Reviews and essays in English literature

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1

REVIEWS AND ESSAYS IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE

GEORGE BELL & SONS

LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN
NEW YORK : 66, FIFTH AVENUE, AND
BOMBAY : 53, ESPLANADE ROAD
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO.

REVIEWS AND ESSAYS

IN

ENGLISH LITERATURE

BY

THE REV. DUNCAN C. TOVEY, M.A.

Clark Lecturer at Trinity College^ Cambridge ; editor of " Gray and his
Fritndt " ; " Thomson' e Poetical IVorks," etc.

LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS

1897

CHISWICK PSB8S :— CHAKLBS WHITTINGMAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCBRY LANB, LONDON.

To M. T.

Madam,

In dedicating this volume to you, I presume upon
the kindness which has placed at my disposal the
sketch (signed with your respected initials) with which
it concludes.

That sketch, Madam, is like the solitary Tangerine
orange (floating at the top in a little lake of syrup)
which the lamented Comey Grain was wont to recom-
mend to the young hostess as a simple but sure note
of distinction for the otherwise conventional trifle.

The critic, in his paltering fashion, dissects and dis-
sects, destroying the vital principle which he is en-
deavouring to discover — and then you come, and
presto I the victims revive, quickened by a breath so
kindred that they mistake it for their own.

That through you I am enabled " to adorn my page,"
great boon as it is, is among the least of those many
boons which entitle me to subscribe myself,

Madam,

Your obliged and grateful servant,

D. C. TOVEY.

PREFACE

THOUGH the following papers are reprinted, by
kind permission, from the " Guardian," it is right
to say that that journal is in no way responsible for
the opinions here expressed.

The paper on the Teaching of English Literature is
written with considerable exaggeration, not so much of
fact as of tone. The writer is himself as guilty as any
of those whom he impugns ; and states a problem of
which he can only offer a partial and tentative solution.
His excuse for vehemence must be, that there is so
much clamour upon educational questions at the
present day, that, in order to be heard, it is necessary
to shout.

Some remarks upon certain characteristics of the
eighteenth century, borrowed for the writer's life of
Thomson, appear now in their original setting in the
Essay on Gay.

CONTENTS

PAGE

The Teaching of English Literature .... i

MoRE's Utopia

Fuller's Sermons 39

Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield 51

Arnold's Last Essays 71

Edmund Waller 88

John Gay 115

OssiAN and His Maker 138

Coventry Patmore 156

Elizabethan Poetry 169

A Cambridge Reminiscence 182

REVIEWS AND ESSAYS IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE

THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH

LITERATURE

IT would be perhaps too much to say that we have a
profound mistrust of the value of examinations in
English Literature ; but we have a rooted conviction
that in any of the forms in which they are conducted by
the Universities at present, they are producing a de-
finite mischief. Take for instance the Cambridge Local
Examinations. That passionate pursuit of accuracy and
precision, that deep-rooted suspicion of anything that
savours of vague discursive generalization (so often a
cover for ignorance), which as a rule distinguishes the
University of Cambridge, is in these examinations
brought to bear upon a subject which can only be
adequately treated upon lines which give ample scope
for these or equally glaring blemishes, and enable
those who have no real taste, judgment, or knowledge
to indulge in unlimited nonsense. It is possible for

example to ask for a comment on the dramatic purpose

B

2 THE TEACHING OF

and meaning of Othello's " Put out the light and then
— put out the light ! " and the question may produce
one or two sensible answers which as a test of literary
capacity or promise would be far more convincing
than the result of any amount of cram work. But on
the other hand it has produced, and that not from a
schoolboy, but from an undergraduate, the answer,
"Othello says this, dallying with the extinguisher."
It is much safer and easier to ask for the meaning and
derivation of a word, the evidence for the date of a
play, the source from which the plot has been derived,
or the point of an allusion. But what is the result of this
method ? That hundreds of boys' schools, hundreds
of high schools for girls all over the country in eager
competition, anxious to advertise the number of their
successes achieved in the Cambridge "Locals" are
busy months and months beforehand, getting by heart
the notes and introduction to the prescribed play of
Shakespeare in the Clarendon Press Series. The notes
and introduction^ be it remembered, not the text ; that
is the last thing thought of ^ The able editor, Mr.
Aldis Wright, who has perhaps done more than any
living man to make the careful study of Shakespeare
possible and the meaning of Shakespeare clear in this
portable and inexpensive form to a large number of
his countrymen, must find the sweets of success alloyed

^ There is abundant circumstantial evidence against the young
lady who is accused of having fastened down the text with a piece
of elastic bej::ause it interfered with her reading the notes.

A candidate has been found to afifirm that the notes to a par-
ticular play were written before the text

ENGLISH LITERATURE 3

with some bitterness if he knows that in the minds of
the rising generation he has absolutely ousted the
great genius whom he has illustrated so well. It is
the firm conviction of many schoolboys that Euclid is
the work of Euclid's best-known editor ; and if it is
not proved already to their satisfaction that Shake-
speare is the work of Mr. Aldis Wright it will " go
nigh to be thought so shortly/' and will be a matter
of critical and absolutely demonstrable certainty even to
some adults in generations yet unborn. Of the reams
of paper at this moment in the world and replenished
from year to year, inscribed with a perfectly faithful
reproduction of Mr. Aldis Wright's notes, it is highly
improbable that nothing will survive the wreck of
ages. And if one such document so survives it will by
many be held to establish beyond question or cavil
that Mr. Aldis Wright wrote Shakespeare.^ There
are intelligent persons now who assign that exploit to
Bacon on the extremely slender evidence afforded by

* This was written in 1886. For Dr. Aldis Wright's editions,
those of Mr. Verity, which contain more aesthetic criticism, are
now from time to time prescribed for these examinations. It is
worse to cram opinions than to cram explanatory details. One
and the same play is set for junior and senior students, the only
difference being that the paper set for the seniors is supposed to
be the harder. 1 1 is not thus that graduation should be attempted.
All that can be expected of young minds — whether they be called
senior or junior — is that they should be able to construe their
Shakespeare, tell the story of the play, and describe in their own
language the characters of the dramatis persona. But a senior
student might be ^expected to read more than one play in the
year.

4 THE TEACHING OF '

his " Promus," evidence which is but dust in the balance
compared with the irresistible inferences which will be
drawn from a paper which may contain absolutely
nothing of Shakespeare, and yet will explain some of
the most difficult passages which have been attributed
to his hand.

But, it may be asked, must not the candidate at
any rate read the text in order to understand the
plot? By no means always. Let us suppose, for
example, that " As You Like It " is set as the play for
examination. The story in Lodge's novel is substan-
tially the same as the plot of the play, and this story
is given at all necessary length in the introduction.
But most of the characters bear different names, and
hence when any details of the plot of " As You Like
It" are asked for, half of the several thousand
examinees, instead of Orlando write Rosader, instead
of Oliver Saladyney the usurping Duke appears in
their papers as Torismond^ the banished Duke as
Gerismond. And the probability is that this is re-
garded as quite a trifling error for which some
examiners might deduct a mark or two and others
none at all. It would indeed require an act of courage
beyond the reach of any single man to do the ab-
solutely right thing upon this unmistakable evidence
of " the cloven hoof," and condemn the whole mass
of worse than useless rubbish without further notice
to the flames. The shriek of horror and protestation
which would rise up from half the middle-class schools
in the kingdom at this wholesale destruction of "the

ENGLISH LITERATURE 5

labour of the long year " would be overwhelming and
irresistible, nor in fact would the University be justified
in punishing so severely the educational blunders
which its methods had encouraged.

The only way to lead young minds to a real
knowledge of Shakespeare is to induce them to love
him. This is a much more difficult task than is
commonly supposed, and even Charles and Mary
Lamb have achieved but a partial success in attempt-
ing it. Its difficulty has increased since their day,
because counter-attractions have enormously multi-
plied. Even with no such temptations in the way, to
appreciate Shakespeare when he is easiest requires in
most cases the experience of life ; to interpret him
when he is hardest taxes the resources even of practised
and subtle understandings. Yet the spirit of Shake-
speare can be caught by many adults and some young
people simply by reading Shakespeare; and, this
first step achieved, the exacter study of his text
becomes a labour of love. We know an excellent
man of business who has much of Shakespeare by
heart, and whose comments upon his genius and his
characters, if less ambitious than those of some erudite
Germans, are at least as sensible, who makes use of
various annotators and of Schmidt's " Shakespeare
Lexicon " in a way which would gratify the heart of
the most rigid of examiners.

The study of English Literature in middle-class
schools might be expected ultimately to exercise a re-
fining influence — or, at any rate, to expurgate some of

6 THE TEACHING OF

the forms of speech which are transforming, but by no
means beautifying the Engh'sh language. How far
the methods by which this study is promoted are on
the way to produce this result in the long run may be
guessed by the fact that a goodly proportion of the
candidates who are examined in the " Merchant of
Venice " will tell us that " the leaden casket contains
Portia's /At?/^." — and one of them has been known to
state on the strength of the songwhich has been cleverly
adapted as a baker's advertisement, that Shakespeare
uses " fancy " in the sense of " fancy bread." The boy
imbued with letters (save the mark ! ) on such a system
sometimes developes into the undergraduate, who in
his Little-go — we cite a fact — writes his translation
from the Greek of the New Testament, " He did not
many wonderful works there on ajc of their unbelief"
These instances may be straws, but they are straws
which show which way the wind is blowing. Demos
is well represented now at Cambridge, no less than in
the local centres to which Cambridge extends her in-
fluence, and so is that other king named Dinos, the
mechanical principle, who has expelled Zeus. When
Dinos cross-questions Demos he leaves vulgarity un-
checked ; and the disgusted Spirit of Literature, always
something of a truant, and only with the greatest tact
and management to be beguiled into a formal exami-
nation, goes off elsewhere.

The truth is that the philologers are masters of this
field. This is the danger of ^//examinations in litera-
ture ; it is the inevitable result of such examinations

ENGLISH LITERATURE 7

when conducted on a large scale. It is impossible to
estimate the relative merits of several thousand boys
and girls if a subject is proposed as a test of their taste,
or their incipient love of letters ; it is easy enough to
do so, if it is proposed as a test of their memories and
their knowledge of the meaning of words or phrases.
But let us cherish no illusions. We have as little
chance of recommending literature to the youthful
mind by these disintegrating processes as the sim-
pleton in the old Greek story had of selling his house
by carrying about a brick of it as a sample.

Ag^n, we have the highest respect for Grimm's
Law, yet we cannot at times repress a sigh for the
good old days before this terrible instrument of tor-
ture was placed in the teacher's or examiner's hand.
Armed with the mighty mace of giant Grimm^ the
modem philologer is abroad in the land like a new
iconoclast, smashing to pieces all the most precious
monuments of literature. The time may have gone
by when a lecturer on Wordsworth could devote two
or more lectures to the analysis of the poet's name by
means of this formidable implement. But there still
exists, we believe, an edition for the use of schools of
the " Lay of the Last Minstrel," which is prefaced by
a faithful statement of the *' Law." There, at any
rate, if we may adapt Milton,

** That tremendous engine at the door • •

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."

Down before it goes Sir Walter with all his chivalry,

« THE TEACHING OF

and minstrel and moss-trooper are pounded to a
mummy for the imagination of the schoolboy for ever.
We do not much care to know what was the precise
educational aim in this particular case. We are sure
that these and kindred efforts can have but one prac-
tical result It is quite possible that some promising
young soul, if the modem schoolmaster would but
leave him alone, might be caught by the swing and
rush of heroic verse, and inspired with a genuine
enthusiasm. But his tormentor interferes, and seizes
him almost literally by the throat in the middle not
only of sentences but of words and syllables, and all
the poor boy's poetic life is squeezed out of him as
surely and under the same absurd circumstances as the
vital spark was extinguished in the vanquished com-
batant in "The Critic," who would have added
" — nity " but was forced to leave the victor to add it
for him. We can picture the scene. The boy is
reading or reciting from the " Lady of the Lake " :

" Unwounded from the dreadful clojse
But breathless all Fitz "

" Stop, Jones ! what is the meaning and derivation of
the prefix Fitz ? " And having disposed of Fitz, the
tyrant proceeds to demolish James and all the Ja-
cobean dynasty, Jacob (with a plunge into Old and
New Testament history), Jacopo, Giacomo, lachimo,
lago (annexing here all the territory between Venice
and ^Compostella with an expedition across the At-
lantic if time permits, and all the range of literature

ENGLISH LITERATURE 9

from Shakespeare to the Acta Sanctoruin)^ Jaques
(with Shakespeare again and a good casus belli and
plea for invading France in the Jacquerie and Jean
Jacques Rousseau), and Yakoob Khan (with a con-
spectus of contemporary events in Afghanistan, and a
general sketch of the history of the British Empire in
India).

If there are some who may accuse us of exaggerating
here we comfort ourselves with the certain knowledge
that there are many long-suffering persons, old and
young, who are aware that this is " ower true a tale,"
and that a teacher who should follow the plan here
just faintly indicated would be very generally re-
garded as a person of some resource who might always
be trusted to " make a lesson." The man that does
these things should be punished like false Sextus. He

should

" see strange visions
Which none besides may see,"

even as already, thanks to philology

" strange sounds are in his ears
Which none may hear but he."

The pure Spirit of Poetry whom he has outraged

should sit beside his bed through the watches of the

night and

" sing of great old houses
And fights fought long ago,''

and his tongue should cleave to the roof of his mouth
in unavailing struggles to interrupt her " sweet voice
and low," and bid her derive, and parse, and construe.

10 THE TEACHING OF

She should sing her immortal song this time quite to
the end, and he should be compelled to listen ; she
should sing it

"until the east was grey,
Then, pointing to her bleeding breast,
Should shriek, and flee away/'

We have before us an edition of the first book of the
" Excursion " " for the use of schools." In the first
three lines we are pulled up in the notes four times.
Of these four interruptions one is made in order to
derive " landscape," the other to explain " downs "
which we are told mean " high flats. For the meaning
of flat compare (passage quoted) Milton's * Paradise
Lost,* bk. iv., 252 ; for the meaning of height ^ compare
(passage quoted) Gower * Confessio Am.,' bk. iv."

What man with a brain and a heart would not watch
with interest mixed with anxiety a boy who should be
led by a taste and " natural piety " beyond his years to
read such a poem as the " Excursion " ? The gentle
creature should be watched and guarded, but in this
matter he should be dealt with very tenderly. He
should be sent out to play that he might be as like
other boys as possible, in the possession of the health
and elastic spirits and manly fortitude which he is sure
to need more than others in the petty persecution to
which a character so exceptional is likely to be exposed;
but the same kind eye and voice should help him to
remain as unlike them as God meant him to be in the
things of the mind. The fragile little craft should be
carefully steered between the Scylla of morbid and

ENGLISH LITERATURE ii

unsociable priggishness, and the Charybdis of athletic
twaddle and small talk which hopelessly engulphs
every other topic in the modem schoolbo/s imagina-
tion. The sanctuary of that soul where a little cultus
is maintained which is not far from the worship of the
Highest should be guarded by discretion and tact, and
a policy of non-interference apparent rather than real,
with occasional private hints of sympathy and the
most marked absence, at any rate, of any official en-
couragement of that tyrannous inanity which is not
only sublimely satisfied with itself, but would reduce
everything abnormal in the boy-world in which it reigfns
supreme to its own dead level. But Dis aliter visum.
This is but guerilla warfare in the judgment of the
modem and omnipotent drill-sergeants of the human
mind. To temper the premature love of poetry in the
few and to excite it in the many there is but one and
the same sovereign method — it is 'to pack both the few
and the many into the same anatomical museum and
show them her skeleton. We have as good a right as
another, even though that other were a German, to
discover the true meaning of Hamlet ; and Hamlet is,
in our judgment, the prototype and prophecy of the
new pedagogue in

'' inky cloak
And customary suit of solemn black " —

improving before his youthful audience the dry bones
of the dictionary and bidding these dry bones get them
to the chamber of my lady Poesy, and tell her " let her
paint an inch thick yet to this favour she must come."

12 THE TEACHING OF

We take up next to the book which started these
reflections a little volume so like it in shape and size
and binding that the one might easily be mistaken
for the other. It is a selection of scenes from the
" Electra " of Euripides by Mr. Arthur Sidgwick. Mr.
Arthur Sidgwick has given a new impulse, a new lease
of life to the study of Greek as a necessary element in
public school education. He has headed a revolt
against that treatment of the Greek and Latin classics
in schools which has made them nothing but a peg on
which to hang the lessons of the grammar and the
dictionary.^ He has not neglected those lessons ; he
has put them in a concise and practical form, with
a striking absence of those ponderous technicalities
which are in some quarters considered to be necessary
to intellectual discipline. This kindly interpreter
between great minds and little ones tries to make the
scenes of Attic tragedy and comedy alive once more
in the schoolroom by giving gestures to the characters
and tones to their voices. The tragic tale, judiciously
shortened, can now be read to its climax in one school
term instead of being discarded when half told for
another, to the utter ruin of all possible interest in the
development of the plot. The effect and, we believe,
the intention of all this is at once to excite an interest

^ The schoolboy who translated

''who knew both the present and the future and the future
perfect^ is a typical and suggestive instance of the occasional
results of this method.

ENGLISH LITERATURE 13

in the theme, and to make that interest combine with
sound and sufficient grammatical knowledge as a g^ide
to the meaning expressed in an extremely difficult
language. Of all incentives to acquiring an unknown
tongue, strong curiosity is the most potent, and a man
with no linguistic ability has often been known to
master under this impulse a language in which he can
find the best treatment of the subjects in which he is
most keenly interested. And as no man can be a
perfect scholar who is without the intellectual curiosity
which includes a literary interest in the masterpieces of
the ancient world, so many a mind perhaps incapable
of the highest scholarship may be won to a certain
measure of scholarship by the same attraction. But
here is the point of this apparent digression. If Mr.
Sidgwick's method is right, the method of the editor
of Wordsworth's "Excursion " must certainly be wrong.
If in order that the spirit of literature may be seized
it is right to economize the treatment of words and
structure even in an unknown tongue, it must be wrong
to multiply impediments of this kind in a tongue
perfectly familiar. The difficulty which the young
find in Wordsworth lies not in Wordsworth's language,
but in the immaturity of the youthful mind, and a boy
who in order to understand the " Excursion " really
needs an explanation of such words as " downs "
and " landscape " ought to be studying not the " Ex-
cursion," but the horn-book. But the truth is we are
beginning the reign of pedantry in English just when
we are dropping it in Greek. And, oddly enough,

14 THE TEACHING OF

these diametrically opposite movements seem to be
part of the same educational effort, and appear in the
same form and from the hands of the same publishers.
Messrs. Rivington will, we are sure, excuse us for com-
paring them to Penelope, who was a most virtuous and
industrious person. But we must point out to them
that all the educational web which they are weaving in
the daylight of Mr. Arthur Sidgwick they are undoing
in the dark night of some at least of their editors of
the English Classics. And they have not Penelope's
excuse ; for their object should be to attract juvenile
and, at present, by no means ardent suitors, whilst hers
was to repel suitors more mature and importunate. If
these two lines of effort which they are encouraging
simultaneously meet with the success which both are
equally adapted to achieve, we predict a singular result.
It will be of paramount importance what subjects we
select for study in Greek literature, whilst for English
literature this consideration will be of absolutely no
importance whatever. As the philological method of
interpretation, fostered by teachers and examiners be-
cause it is the easiest to manage, prevails more and
more, it will gradually dawn upon the schoolmaster
that to go to Scott and Wordsworth for the nails by
which to fasten the " anatomy " of language is to
travel rather far. By the time that he has learnt on
the one hand to open the youthful mind to the fascina-
tions of dramatic art in the pages of Euripides and
Aristophanes, he will have discovered on the other
that he has the raw material of verbal criticism ready

ENGLISH LITERATURE 15

to his hand in the songs of the nursery. Common
sense and economy will combine to encourage a method
of instruction in "English Literature" which, while
differing in no essential respect from that which he is
at present pursuing, will outrage no sentiments of re-
verence, will beget no life-long antipathy to letters, and
will require no other machinery than a black-board
and a piece of chalk ; and he will gently lead his
pupils from the study of pathos in the " Alcestis "
and of wit and humour in the "Knights" to the
exposition of " Ba Ba Black Sheep," by the aid of
Grimm's law.

There are few well-trained classical scholars who
do not occasionally regret that the habit of minute
attention to words and structure begotten by the long
discipline through which they have passed mars their
power of reading continuously, and consequently of
contemplating the total effect of the great works of
ancient literature. They may try to forego this habit
for a while, to read Homer with no thought of Homer's
many commentators, and without turning to the
Lexicon for the meaning of a word which they may
chance to have forgotten ; but this comparative
holiday of the mind hardly to be won over Homer
becomes harder still to procure over iEschylus, and
quite impossible over Thucydides. The acquired
conscience, like the innocent mania of Johnson and De
Morgan for touching all the railings, keeps teasing
till it gets its rights, and the haunting word or note is
hunted up after all, just as after a hesitating pause and

i6 THE TEACHING OF

shuffle on the pavement, the omitted railing is re-
visited and religiously touched. We are not assailing
the system which, if attended by this drawback, has
produced so many accurate and subtle minds, but we
submit that the intellect is not always to be curbed
with bit and bridle, " like horse and mule which have
no understanding," and that even horses and mules are
sometimes sent out to grass. Modern literature is the
playground of the mind which has received its special
discipline elsewhere. The difficulties of language
which we multiply in Greek and Latin we ought, at
any rate, to minimize here. In particular, young and
promising scholars should be encouraged to draw
from the " fresh woods and pastures new " of English
literature which are open to them, without any fence
or hedge of linguistic difficulty, the quickening spirit
which they may infuse into the dry bones of classical
study and make them live again. Much that they
have to learn in the schoolroom is only not pedantry,
because it is discipline; that they should approach
Scott and Wordsworth ^ in the same way is pedantry
without excuse. If this sort of thing goes on, if the

^ There is abundant reason for annotating Milton or Shake-
speare, or Spenser or Chaucer. There is ample justification for
such an edition as the selections from Burke, with the excellent
commentary of Mr. Payne in the Clarendon Press Series, as
well as for the edition of Pope's " Essay on Man," and "Satires,"
by Mr. Mark Pattison. There is, in short, good reason for
editing with explanatory notes every book the meaning and
spirit of which cannot be seized without them. But such edi-
tions as we name are just as necessary for adults as for boys.

ENGLISH LITERATURE 17

rigid educationalist is allowed to say, like a new
i£neas, boasting this time of suffering not endured
but inflicted by himself —

** Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ? "

the persecuted human spirit will nowhere find asylum,
but, as Cicero says to Marcellus, wherever we are, we
shall be equally in the power of the conqueror.

We remember with gratitude and affection one
eminent scholar, who, by precept and example,
illustrated that combination of discipline and play of
thought which, perhaps because it is so rare already,
we are doing our best to make rarer still. The late
W. G. Clark advised a young student, by way of
bettering his style of translation, to read Clarendon
and Jeremy Taylor, and he was accustomed to preface
his lectures to freshmen by suggestive remarks, ex-
pressed with the easy grace which distinguished all he
said, which just indicated the fact that there was
another goal beyond that of verbal criticism. He
would link, for example, the ancient and the modem
world by points of contrast or comparison, citing an
instance of a modem simile from a now forgotten
poet, Alexander Smith, who compares the flux and
reflux of the sea to a bridegroom, who, admiring his
bride —

*^ Falls back a space to see how fair she be,
Then straight runs up to kiss her,"

and pointing out how foreign is such a fancy to the
simpler and severer spirit of ancient poetry.

C

i8 THE TEACHING OF

Why should it be so generally assumed as it is in
practice that there is no via media between dilettantism
and pedantry in the treatment of English literature ?
There is the historical method, of all methods, in our
judgment, the most fruitful and satisfactory. The late
Professor J. S. Brewer, in his lectures at King^s
j College, London, almost invariably treated literature
! in close connection with history, explaining the
i literature of every epoch by the light of the movements
\ and tendencies of which it was the expression. These
lectures were not, we believe, considered to " pay " for
the purposes of any examination held outside the
walls of the college. But there are many, if we
mistake not, who owe that solid and profound scholar
a debt of gratitude for habits of thought which are
more and better than any temporary success. A good
historian with a love of letters — and these two qualifi-
cations are in practice inseparable — is an excellent
teacher of English literature ; his feet are always on
solid ground, and his head is never in the clouds.
The spirit of the age as exhibited in the world of
action he finds reflected in the world of thought, and
he starts at any rate with a clear and distinct mental
picture, to the main outlines of which we may always
confidently trust. There are no more instructive lessons
in the elements of criticism than the chapters on litera-
ture in the pages of our great historians ; some of these
may be men with limited sympathies, and there may
be depths, especially in poetry, which they make no
attempt to sound, but as a rule they speak what they

ENGLISH LITERATURE 19

see and know, and of things really to be seen and
known.

There is a certain contempt now in vogue, especially
among schoolmasters, for manuals of English literature.
To our thinking these works are among the most satis-
factory of the efforts which have been made to impart a
knowledge of the subject. There are many books which
it is no disgrace not to have read, but which it is dis-
creditable not to know something about We would
rather boys did not read Swifk,and we should think little
of the wisdom and^idiscretion of any one who put into a
boy's hands the " Tale of a Tub." But it is not well
that any one should pass as an educated man who
does not even know as much about Swift's place
in literature as these manuals will tell him. No one is
to be blamed for not having read " The Vision of
William concerning Piers the Plowman," but the scope
and significance of that poem, and the epoch to which
it belongs, should be known by everybody. It is as
justifiable to get our knowledge about many books at
second hand as it is to learn many facts of history
without searching the State papers. This concession
is made to the limitations of the mind and the brevity
of human life in every other study except that of
literature. There alone we seem to admit no com-
promise between the minutest examination of parti-
cular authors and a stupendous affectation of original
research of the widest compass, sometimes attended
with results at once absurd and deplorable.

But, above all, let the schoolmaster encourage play

20 THE TEACHING OF

of mind and do something to keep the mind's play-
ground wholesome. Men despise the old days when
the soul was fed on Latin verses, and those days are
gone past recall. Nevertheless the New Zealander
who is to discover so many relics of our ruined
civilization, whilst he will find very few evidences
indeed that the English boy was capable of thought
or imagination on his own account in the year 1886,
if he lights upon a mouldering copy of the " Musae
Etonenses," may find the indications which he misses
for 1886 discoverable in abundance for the period
between 1796 and 1833. This was not because of the
Latin verse, which, as the vehicle of thought, is a trick
which can be acquired by practice by very unthinking
minds. But the food on which the spirit of the public
school boy is nourished has at all times been only very
partially supplied in the classroom. And if at this
present epoch he is too often in mind a child, when he
ought to begin to be a man, it is because his parents
and the public insist at the same time that he shall be
a splendid animal, andithat his mental powers shall be
frittered away upon every branch of knowledge under
the sun, with methods necessarily imperfect but often
needlessly mechanical. The first of these conditions
he fulfils completely to their satisfaction and his own ;
against the second his mind rebels with a reaction
either voluntary or involuntary. The little leisure
which is left to him after the one duty has been con-
scientiously fulfilled, and the other dealt with at best
in a spirit of compromise, he devotes to the records of

ENGLISH LITERATURE 21

athletics, the perusal of the society journals, and the
reading, often so edifying, which he can enjoy in the
daily papers. His novel, if he ever reads a novel, has
been described by the typical title "The Blue-nosed
Bandit : a Tale of Blood, in three vols., bound in
yellow." What power have Scott and Dickens and
Thackeray over a mind on which this terrific outlaw
exercises his ghoul-like fascinations? An eminent
schoolmaster of a past generation thought " Pickwick "
and ** Punch" were vitiating the taste and checking
the reflective powers of the young of his time. Few
boys now can appreciate " Pickwick," and we shall not
be suspected of exact agreement with all Mr. Punch's
judgments when we say that we sincerely wish that
our boys were capable of enjoying his wit and humour.
The ocean of bad taste which is now deluging them
will soon sweep away from their minds the last traces
of his amiable reign. It is an ocean which needs a
strong breakwater to keep it out, and it is quite beyond
the control of any pedagogic Mrs. Partington with her
philological mop.

MORE'S UTOPIA^

THE problem of More*s opinions is in some respects
so intricate that it is not surprising that there
should be but scant consensus on the subject. Yet we
confess that we see little or nothing, at least in his
" Utopia," that is not explicable as the conclusion, true
to the standpoint for the time being assumed, of a
comprehensive and severely logical mind. Of his
actions indeed, and of his subsequent opinions, a some-
what different account must be given. Here he un-
doubtedly suffered through the official position which
was forced upon his retiring and meditative disposition,
through the influence of the monarch whose character
he penetrated, and whose despotic authority he had
rejected in speculation but often in practice obeyed
against the grain,through a contempt for the judgments
and convictions of the unlettered (the common error
of learning at that time), resulting in a line of conduct
towards these which contrasted not only in fact but
in spirit with his theoretical advocacy of liberty of
thought ; and through the violence of civil and religious
reformers, which threw him into a reactionary attitude

* " Sir Thomas More." By W. H. Hutton, B.D. Methuen.

MORE'S UTOPIA 23

and made him a zealous advocate of impugned doctrines
and institutions which had possessed at one time but
little attraction for him. Nor when he answered a
coarse attack upon the religious orders, can he have
forgotten that he had himself in his " Utopia " lent
much countenance to the plainer speech of vulgar men
on the subject. The desire which he himself at one
time entertained for monastic seclusion was quite com-
patible with the conviction — reasonable or otherwise —
that these institutions had been multiplied to excess,
and fostered much idleness to the detriment of the
State. We are of opinion that the whole of the
" Utopia " is to be taken, with differences indeed of
standpoint, quite seriously. And if any parts of it
have a direct purpose, these, it is admitted, are such as
comment upon European, and particularly English,
institutions. It is More, and only ostensibly Raphael
H5^hlodaye, who exclaims (near the beginning of the
second book), " How great and how idle a company is
there of priests and religious men, as they call them,''
unless we are to suppose that More thus wantonly in-
sinuates, without controverting, an opinion which he did
not himself entertain on an important topic of the day.
To the same purport is one of the liveliest passages in
the first book — the conversation in which Hythlodaye
professes to have taken part at Cardinal Morton's table.
There a proposal is made by a certain jesting parasite
or scoffer that all beggars shall be distributed and
bestowed into houses of religion, the men to be made
lay brethren and the women nuns. Whereupon a

24 MORE'S UTOPIA

certain friar, graduate in divinity — albeit "a man of
grisly and stern gfravity," enters into the spirit of the
thing, and insists that some provision shall be made
also for friars. " Why," said the jester, " that is done
already, for my lord himself (the Cardinal) set a very
good order for you when he decreed that vagabonds
should be kept strait and set to work ; for you be the
greatest and veriest vagabonds that be." Upon which
the friar could not refrain himself from chiding, scold-
ing, railing, and reviling ; and in the course of his heat
this graduate in divinity gives samples of his skill in
the application of Scripture, of which this one shall
suffice :

" If many scomers of Helizeus, whiche was but one bald
man, felt the zeal of the bald, how much more shall one
scomer of many friars feel, among whom be many bald
men ? " " And we have also," he adds, " the Pope's Bulls,
whereby all that mock and scora us be excommunicate,
suspended and accursed."

The scene is Erasmus's " Encomium Moriae," in
little ; the method of Erasmus dramatized ; Folly set
to work to anatomize folly, and to bring into view the
indolence and arrogance of these men, the perverse
and barbarous ingenuity of their pretensions to learn-
ing, and the abuse of the highest spiritual authority in
championing them. If, as Mr. Hutton tells us (some-
what boldly, as we think), More*s views were through-
out his life in substantial accordance with those of
Erasmus, this was emphatically the case in the days of
the " Utopia " and " Encomium." It is strange indeed

.4

MORE'S UTOPIA 25

to note how these fraternal minds went for a time pari
passu. Perhaps even More's unfinished devotional
treatise " Memorare Novissima " was suggested to his
mind by Erasmus's " Enchiridion Militis Christianl"
Perhaps, on the other hand, a comparison might
bring out a characteristic difference between these two
kindred spirits. In the "Enchiridion" the man of
letters, and even the dialectician, is almost as much in
evidence as the Christian moralist Writing in Latin,
Erasmus never forgets the Latinist, and his extreme
classicism of language and allusion gives to his book a
semblance of unreality which perhaps does not belong
to it. The point of contact between the two books is
their simplicity on the doctrinal side ; but More's sin-
cerity strikes home because he writes in his native
tongue ; in this province, on the other hand, as in his
elaborate and pungent satire, Erasmus leaves on us
the impression of mental rather than moral force. It
is harder to distinguish the two men in intellect than
in temperament up to the point at which temperament
and circumstances come into play, and investigation
would disclose many resemblances indicating their
close community in thought and study. One harmony
between "Utopia " and the " Colloquies " has especially
struck us — the reconciliation of the Epicurean theory
of pleasure with religion :

"The Utopians," says More, "reason of virtue and
pleasure. ... In this point they seem almost too much
given and inclined to the opinion of them, which defend
pleasure, wherein they determine either all or the chiefest

i

26 MORE'S UTOPIA

part of man's felicity to rest. And (which is more to be
marvelled at) the defence of this so dainty and delicate an
opinion they fetch even from their grave, sharp, bitter, and
rigorous religion. For they never dispute of felicity or
blessedness, but they join unto the reasons of philosophy
certain principles taken out of religion. . . . Those prin-
ciples be these and such like; that the soul is immortal,
and by the bountiful goodness of God ordained to felicity;
that to our virtues and good deeds rewards be appointed
after this life, and to our evil deeds punishments."

In the last of his ''Colloquies" Erasmus makes Hedo-
nius maintain with success that, " Nulli m^^is sunt
Epicure! quam Christian! bene viventes." This view
!s familiar enough now, but it was, possibly. More who
first gave it definite expression, and the best evidence
that it was startling is the pains which Erasmus sub-
sequently took to pretend that the opinion was that of
the person of the dialogue, and not his own. Erasmus
is generally, we believe, more successful in attack than
in apology ; his defence of the "Colloquies," in this and
in other particulars, might be called disingenuous, if it
were not transparent. More, in the very form of his
" Utopia," leaves himself everywhere a much safer locus
poenitentiae ; in the land of Nowhere his mind was at
large, whatever restrictions his faith might impose on
it ; his delicate but effective irony could there work at
will. What could be more pointed, and at the same
time more unassailable, than the simple statement that
the Utopians " have priests of exceeding holiness, and,
therefore^ very few ? " And whilst we have all admired

MORE'S UTOPIA 27

a thousand times the scene in which Gulliver rouses
the wrath and disgust of the Brobdingnagian, by de-
scribing the skill of Europeans in the invention and
use of weapons of destruction, it may be questioned
whether More, less vigorous and less misanthropic
than Swift, is not more adroit and practical in his
picture of the Utopian methods of war. Here let us
quote Mr. Hutton's effective summary, which well ex-
plains More's real drift :

" The Utopians abhor war, and fight only in defence of
their own country, or to defend some oppressed nation.
They fight also, by preference, with cunning, to avoid blood-
shed. They offer large bribes for the assassination of the
chiefs of their adversaries, and for treason among their
enemies. Here the inference was obvious. If these actions
seemed a detestable contrast to the lofty morality of the
Utopians, much more was it a dishonour to a Christian
Government to engage in such intrigues as at that very time
Henry VIII. was carrying on in Scotland. An equally severe
condemnation is employed in the Utopians' employment of
mercenaries. It could have needed no acute intelligence to
recognize the Swiss — whom the King was then employing
— in the Zapoletes, * dwelling in wild woods and high
mountains,' who basely hire themselves to the highest bidder,
and whom it would be well if war had utterly destroyed."

In no way could More have better exhibited his
intense horror of war than in his picture of it as
practised by a peace-loving but severely logical people.
Still more scathing, as a censure upon European
politics, and yet, as Mr. Hutton remarks, without any-

28 MORE'S UTOPIA

thing which authority could reprehend, is the beautiful
irony with which the Utopians are represented as —

" Making no leagues, chiefly because that in those parts of
the world leagues between princes be wont to be kept and
observed very slenderly. For here in Europe^ and especially
in those parts where the faith and religion of Christ reigneth^
the majority of leagues is everywhere considered holy and in-
violable; partly through the justice and goodness of princes^
and partly at the reverence and motion of the head Bishops.
Which, like as they make not promises themselves but they
do very religiously perform the same, so they exhort all
princes in any wise to abide by their promise, and them
that refuse or deny so to do, by their Pontifical power and
authority they compel thereto. And surely they think well
that it might seem a very reproachful thing if, in the leagues of
them which by a peculiar name be called faithful, faith should
have no place. But in that new-found part of the world " —

things, he goes on to say, are very different There
kings and princes practise a crafty dealing which those
who advise them to it would be the loudest to con-
demn in private men ; as if justice was something far
under the dignity of kings ; or as if there were two
justices, one meant for the inferior sort of people, the
other a princely virtue of more majesty and liberty
"to which nothing is unlawful that it lusteth after."
" There could be no clearer reprobation," says Mr.
Hutton, " of any difference between political and
individual morality."

We know of no reason for believing that More ever
altered his opinions on questions of political justice or
of social life ; due regard being had to his function as

MORE'S UTOPIA 29

administrator of the laws as they then stood. But
when Mr. Hutton, in commenting on the " Dialogue,"
of which the first edition appeared in 1529, tells us
that " There is no reason to assume that More's views
had changed since he wrote the * Utopia,' and the
distinct declaration of them in his controversial works
seems to prove that no importance is to be attached
to the ideal picture of religion in the happy island "
he seems to us to say too much. It is surely
paradoxical to suppose that a deeply religious man,
writing under one and the same disguise, meant much
when he treated of morals and justice, and nothing at
all when he treated of religion. We quite understand
Mr. Hutton to mean that More's own doctrinal
opinions were always fixed. Yet, however this may
be, Mr. Hutton's statement certainly obscures the fact
that More's theory of toleration quite fell to pieces.
If he could maintain, after his resignation of the
Chancellorship, that heresy, being a great crime
against God, deserved a severe punishment from the
secular power, he certainly departed from the sugges-
tive wisdom of King Utopus. When More writes of
him : " Though there be one religion which alone is true,
and all other vain and superstitious, yet did he well
foresee (so that the matter were handled with reason
and sober modesty) that the truth of the' (//j) own
power would, at the last issue, out and come to light " :
he is surely not only stating but commending that

* The version of Robynson, who does not know "//r."

30 MORE'S UTOPIA

opinion, and urging it indirectly, as the right policy
for the one true Church. It is scarcely necessary
to remark that this is in the very spirit of Erasmus,
and with that spirit More certainly ceased, both in
practice and in theory, to be " in substantial accord-
ance " on this important topic. The excesses of all
kinds which he traced to the progress of the religious
revolution led him to reconsider the whole question,
and to abandon what was once a first principle to him.
Having to execute measures of repression, he was
glad to persuade himself that these were in accordance
with his conscience, as well as with his official duty.
We have seen it stated that " Utopia " was motived by
More's desire to make his convictions quite clear to
his royal master before becoming bound to his service.
This, if it be so, gives a serious colour to every
speculation in the work which has a bearing upon a
present state of things, and prevents us from accept-
ing Hallam's suggestion that the book is one of those
which men of genius throw off in gaiety of heart,
though we may readily admit that it was written
without much suspicion of the new power of literature
to set ideas fermenting in the world at large. The six-
teenth century offers in this respect a striking parallel
to the eighteenth. Both More and Montesquieu sat
in their studies and satirized and speculated with-
out suspecting that they were sowing a crop for
Smithfield or the guillotine. For this pardonable
blindness More paid a severer penalty than Erasmus,
his colleague in emancipating the mind ; both were

MORE'S UTOPIA 31

aghast at the extravagances to which the freedom of
thought which they advocated had given birth ; but
only More had to visit these with imprisonment and
death.

We believe that More's strongest revolt was against
schism rather than heresy. Mr. Hutton, if we do not
mistake, would make his primary conviction from first
to last the idea of the unity of Christendom, the
Universal Church. When he clearly saw that this
was menaced, he took alarm and abandoned the hope
which he had once cherished with Erasmus of a
Church which should admit great variety of opinion
without rupture. The Utopians are represented as
Monotheists of various sorts, among whom Christianity
has only begun to spread. But we cannot believe
that because they are not Christians the picture of the
unity in worship which they achieved was without
significance or suggestion. It was obvious and safe so
to describe them that censure or admonition might
fall only indirectly upon Christian authorities, and
the moral might be admitted or disclaimed according
to circumstances. But we select one instance, out of
several, in which " they which do not agree to Christ's
religion " must certainly be supposed to read a lesson
to those who do :

"One of our company in my presence was sharply
punished. He, as soon as he was baptized, began against
our wills, with more earnest affection than wisdom to reason
of Christ's religion, and began to wax so hot in his matter,
that he did not only prefer our religion before all other, but

•32 MORE'S UTOPIA

also did utterly despise and condemn all others, calling
them profane, and the followers of them wicked and devilish
and the children of everlasting damnation. When he had
thus long reasoned the matter, they laid hold on him,
accused him, and condemned him into exile, not as a
despiser of religion, but as a seditious person and a raiser up
of dissension among the people."

The only forces which the Utopians permitted in
the propagation of religion were argument or per-
suasion, and prayer ; they immediately and severely
repressed not only violent methods, but violent
language in a religious cause. A signal instance of
this IS a Catholic using in Utopia the language
common in Europe about heretics, and promptly
punished in consequence. Here the drift is quite
unmistakable. And so also, we believe, is the drift
of those passages which describe the common worship
of their various sects. They point to that unity in
diversity which More then believed to be possible in
the Catholic Church.

These side glances at the religious life of Christen-
dom, as More knew it, are not altogether reproachful.
The dim light which the Utopians preferred in their
churches, " because they thought that overmuch light
doth disperse men's cogitations,'* More himself knew
and loved ; with " the unhurtful and harmless kind of
worship " in " frankincense and a great number of wax
candles and tapers " which pleased them, he himself
was pleased. Mr. Hutton is undoubtedly right in
maintaining that their sacerdotal vestments and the

MORE'S UTOPIA 33

homage paid to the priests as they enter the church
have a significance like that of the Catholic ritual.
The point of difference is only evidence of More's
minute attention to consistency. He has described
the Utopians as despising and abhorring gold, and
making it a badge of infamy, and gems and precious
stones but toys and trifles for children. It was there-
fore necessary that he should describe their priests as
clad in colours excellent in workmanship rather than
materials, and precious because of the pains and skill
which devotion had expended upon them ; and, be*
sides, More thus has an opportunity of hinting how
much more real an offering such labour is than the
easy and indolent profusion with which wealthy men
in Europe brought their gifts to the altar. And we
agree with Mr. Hutton that no inference as to More's
view on the place of images and pictures in Catholic
worship can be drawn from the bare statement that
the Utopians " have no image of any god in the church,
to the intent it may be free for every man to con-
ceive God by their religion after what likeness and
similitude they will." It should, indeed, be obvious
that this is a necessary corollary to the statement
that the church was the meeting-place for common
worship between sects whose symbolism, when they
worshipped apart, varied with no limitation whatever.
In fact, thus much More expressly states : " The
common sacrifices," he says, " be so ordered that they
be no derogation nor prejudice to any of the private
sacrifices and religions." Further, we agree with Mr.

D

34 MORE'S UTOPIA

Hutton that the opinion of the Utopians makes
nothing against celibacy as the rule of the Roman
priesthood, or against fasting as practised by the
faithful and by More himself. Nay, it seems to us
that More's language points the other way. Of the
"religious" in Utopia, one sect is single, the other
married. The Utopians, says More, count the married
the wiser, but the other the holier :

" Which in that they prefer single life before matrimony,
and that sharp life before an easier life, if herein they
grounded upon reason they would mock them. But now
forasmuch as they say they be led to it by religion, they
honour and worship them."

In other words, the Utopians were guided in the
main by the wisdom and reason of nature ; but they
had the candour to acknowledge that there might be
a mode of life dictated by a higher inspiration. As
we have seen, in view of a future state of blessedness
to be attained by it, there was no inconsistency be-
tween the practice of this " grave, sharp, bitter, and
rigorous religion" and the favourite philosophy of
Utopia. We believe, indeed, that More really enter-
tained, with Erasmus, this seeming paradox, and that
his gently expressed wonderment is only an ironical
disguise. The whole passage in which the life of these
rigid ascetics is sketched proves that More would have
been patient enough of the ignorance of the Monks,
but that he believed them to be lazy. His Utopian
celibates, who care nothing for learning, nor "give
their mind to any knowledge of things, utterly forsake

MORE'S UTOPIA 35

and eschew idleness," and undertake all the unpleasant
and hard and vile work which other men refuse. And
More's real sympathy with the principle of monas-
ticism could scarcely be more effectively shown than
in the words describing the conversion of the Utopians
to the Christian faith :

'' I think this was no small help and furtherance in the
matter that they heard us say that Christ, instituted, among
His, all things common, and that the same community doth
yet remain among the rightest Christian companiesJ^

There is nothing, we believe, in the whole of the
"Utopia" that is not explicable, either as indirect
comment or counsel, or as a picture of the best con-
clusions of unassisted human reason. If the Utopians
are allowed under the extremest circumstances, and
then only by the advice and with the sanction of the
priests and magistrates, to seek a voluntary death,
this is surely because More himself had determined
that the wisdom of nature pointed no other way ; and
he limits the practice to cases to which the Socratic
figure of the soldier deserting his post does not apply,
— to sufferers not able to do any duty of life, who, by
" overliving " their own deaths, are noisome and irk-
some to others and grievous to themselves. It is,
however, here, if anywhere, that More's expressed dis-
approval at the end of the work of some of the
Utopian institutions must apply, although he shows
pretty clearly that he means us to draw no inferences
from that general disclaimer, for to the particular in-

MORE'S UTOPIA

stance at which he professes to stumble, the com-
munity' of goods and the prohibition of money, this
notorious contemner of pomp and splendour both in
office and in private life objects, with fine irony, that
dius ^ all nobility, magnificence, worship, honour, and
majesty, the true ornaments and honours, as the com-
mon opinion is, of a commonwealth, utterly be over-
dirown and destroyed."

The " Utopia " is best understood by admitting
that More had a gift, possessed only by the greatest of
religious minds, the Pascals and Newmans of the
world, the power to follow with a measure of sympathy
the workings of the intellect in the natural man.
It is the most beautiful flower and fruit of the new
humanism planted in the safe soil of the Catholic
faith. The liberal culture by which More so abundantly
profited enabled him to abstract himself from his
beliefs, and to convey lessons, otherwise difficult and
dangerous to deliver, through the picture of a wise
and understanding people, with no guide but the
dictates of right reason, with a theistic creed accepted
as the conclusion of that reason and as a satisfaction
of their emotional needs, and a persuasion no less
reasonable that the Being Whom they worshipped
heard and answered prayer, and could and did make
revelations of His will which had a greater claim to
the obedience of individual souls than the wisdom
which sufficed for the ordinary guidance of life. We
are convinced that, whatever details, of the least im-
portance, More embroidered on this framework repre-

MORE'S UTOPIA 37

sent his own convictions both as a thinker and a
Catholic, and that we can discover there in harmonious
fusion the nominalist,^ the utilitarian, the socialist, and
the devout and orthodox Christian. If the book is
not a prophecy of the future, it is at least a prophecy
of opinion. Nor was there aught, save one thing, in
all his subsequent life which can be said, upon a com-
plete view, and with due regard to the functions he
was called upon to discharge, to be at variance with
the beautiful dream which has made him immortal in
the world of thought. If he punished Protestants only
for the violence of their language, he acted in accord-
ance with the practice of the Utopians, except that
his action here was perforce one-sided, and therefore,
though from causes beyond his own control, unjust.
But we think we could prove, if we had space, that his
zeal against heresy pushed him to greater activity even
than his office required.

It is part of his character that if he was once assured
that such active zeal was a duty, he would violate his
own gentle and humane nature to display it. The
man who, as Mr. Hutton finely says, " laid down his
life rather than surrender what he again and again
admitted to be but an opinion," to whom "almost
alone among his contemporaries the conclusions of
the intellect seemed no less sacred than the chastity
of the body," and who " died rather than tarnish the
whiteness of his soul," was little likely to shrink from

^ " Utopia," p. 107, ed. Lumby. Camb. Univ. Press.

38 MORE'S UTOPIA

obloquy when called upon to act from conviction. Yet
so essentially benign was his spirit, so sad his destiny
when once entangled in the policies of an evil time,
that every adverse sentiment about him is lost in love,
regret, and pity. An irony less gentle than that with
which he has played for generations about the hearts
of men forced this soul, all conscience and duty, spite
of shrinkings and forebodings, into the toils of the
moral monster whose opinions shifted with his passions,
and who first taught his victim the doctrine which he
beheaded him for believing. And Rome has done
well to proclaim More a saint, though canonization
is sometimes but the poor and tardy amends which
Churches make when they have inflicted upon other-
wise blameless lives the only stains which posterity is
able to discover.

FULLER'S SERMONS^

OF all our many English writers whom it is
customary to designate as quaint, perhaps Fuller
exhibits a quaintness which savours least of antiquity,
of affectations now quite obsolete. The invariable
note of that Euphuism, of which so many of our prose
writers, until the formation of a classic ,5tyle, had
some trace, was an excess of illustration, not natural
and spontaneous, but far-fetched and studiously
ingenious. Lyly, its prototype, exhausts the animal
and vegetable kingdom to enhance a truism. Burton
accumulates epithets and multiplies quotations, until
it is these, and not his theme, that engage the amused
and bewildered mind. Sir Thomas Browne is never
happy unless he can express a thought, in itself
simple, in the form of an enigma. But Fuller's wit
and fancy have their race^ the flavour of the soil from
which they spring; they belong essentially to a
character, uncommon in all ages, yet not limited to
any age ; to a combination of quick imagination with
a sympathetic temper, hitting upon resemblances too

* "The Collected Sermons of Thomas Fuller." J. E. Bailey
and W. £. A. Axon, Gresham Press.

40 FULLER'S SERMONS

remote for ordinary observation, yet not too abstruse
to be understood and enjoyed at once. Hence a
quaintness such as Fuller's is a recurrent, not an
extinct, phenomenon. A clever matron of to-day,
when " flitting," found a temporary refuge, with her
family, under the hospitable roof of a neighbour, and
said to him on entering, " 1 am afraid you will say,
' Gad, a troop cometh.' " We have found this witticism
twice anticipated by Fuller in the volumes before us.
In South, as in Fuller^ we have that happy medium
of wit, which is the true salt of it, as preserving it
from corruption. But South's wit is often marred by
its asperity, and never more than faintly coloured by
imagination. On the other hand, as Lamb finely
says, " Fuller's conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped
in human feeling and passion ; " and we recognize
almost instinctively that he who called negroes " the
Image of God cut in ebony," must have had much of
the milk of human kindness. These phrases are a
revelation of the inner man, and in the hand of such
as Fuller the pen is as expressive as the facial muscles.
His loftier fancies, in like manner, deserve to live,
because they are really poetic, they have something
emotional in them ; our first impulse on reading them
is to say, not " How ingenious ! " but " How beautiful ! "
And thus Lamb refuses to call the often-quoted
passage about the ashes of Wiclif " a conceit " ; he
truly pronounces it "a grand conception." As a
master of style, Fuller seems to combine with
characteristic moderation various attributes— ^^r//-

FULLER'S SERMONS 41

culam undique decerptam-— of which his great con-
temporaries afford more exaggerated examples. He
has something of Milton's vigour in controversy ; if
his manner falls short of Milton's Demosthenic force, it
lacks also his un-English structure, his gloom, and
his acerbity; and when Fuller is most uncom-
promising there is in him that touch of humour which,
at least in conversation, is even now held to excuse a
pungent repartee. His " Truth Maintained " is a
temperate document ; yet, being arraigned for the
judicious statement that "a Church and a Reformation
will be imperfect, do the best you can," he cannot
help retorting " I said it, and I say it againe ; it was a
Truth before your Cradle was made, and will be one
after your Coffin is rotten." This is a trifle brutal ;
but we feel that it has been prompted not by animosity,
but by the temptation of a telling antithesis. Milton's
moods are few and always severe ; like other great
men, he sinks terribly low, as if in proportion to his
gravity, when in an effort to be popular he sinks at
all. With Fuller the style is always the man ; a man
of many moods, yet none of them ill-natured. And so
the expansive picture-writing of Jeremy Taylor is
almost within the compass of his art, as when he
says:

" As Hills, the higher, the barrener ; so men, commonly
the wealthier, the worse ; the more Honour, the less Holi-
nesse. And as Rivers, when content with a small Channel,
runne sweet and cleare; when swelling to a Navigable
Channel, by the confluence of severall Tributarie Rivulets,

42 FULLER'S SERMONS

gather mudde and mire, and grow salt and brackish, and
violently beare downe all before them ; so many men, who in
meane Estates have been Pious and Religious, being advanced
in Honour and enlarged in Wealth, have growne bothe
impious and prophane towards God, cruell and tyrannical
over their brethren."

If he has not Barrow's exhaustiveness, he has a far
more vivid imagination, and with something of
Barrow's copiousness of language, he marshals his
forces better. As in this :

" Let us all provide for that perfect Reformation in the
world to come ; when Christ shall present the Church his
Spouse to God his Father, Without spot^ coming from man's
corruption, or wrincle^ caused by times continuance. When
we shall have a new Heaven and a new Earthy wherein shall
dwell Righteousnesse : With judgements reformed from error,
wills reformed from wilfulnesse, affections reformed from
mistaking their object, or exceeding their measure ; all powers
and parts of soule and body reformed from sin to sanctity."

In these and a thousand passages we find, at some
point or other, Fuller's invariable mark of distinction,
the charm of antithesis. Lamb, whom nothing escapes,
has noted with what admirable address Fuller has
employed this perpetual balance in his account of
Henry de Essex, where it beguiles us into compassion
for a fate which never, perhaps, engaged much
sympathy before, the fate of a coward. Yet, with all
the effect of art, the contrasts which he delights to
make are not artificial ; they are in nature, in human
life, as he viewed it, and in himself; and the form in

FULLER'S SERMONS 43

which he presents them is the result not only of a
quick apprehension and facile ingenuity, but of large
sympathies aided by the clear vision of a world in
which the colours of good and evil are inseparably
mingled.

We might almost surmise that Fuller's best fancies
owe as much to his character as to his intellect, from
the fact that he sometimes repeats them ; for we soon
tire of thoughts which are so little natural to us, that
we have to cudgel our brains to get at them ; and the
merely artificial creatures of the mind are never our
companions. If Fuller more than once employs the
thought " Conscience is the Attorney-General of the
King of Heaven in our Hearts, to press the evidence
after the Indictment," it is because this seems to him,
once for all, to be the best expression of a felt truth,
and he will not go beyond it in search of a novelty
more ingenious but less exact. And when Waller
writes :

" The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks which time has made,
Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become
As they draw near to their eternal home,'* —

we are surprised to find in him of all men a conceit
thus steeped in human and religious feeling. Lamb
has noted the resemblance to Fuller's words about St
Monica ; but the truth is this is a favourite child of
Fuller's genius, born as early as 1633. In a sermon
then preached at Cambridge, and repeated often else-
where, he says of the righteous :

44 FULLER'S SERMONS

'' Grace by custome is made another nature unto them,
especially toward the latter end of their lives : partly because
their soules do steale a Glymps, Glance, or Pisgah-sight of
heaven through the Clefts and Chinkes of their Age- or sick-
nesse-broken bodies; and partly because, as all motion is
swiftest the neerest it comes to the Center, so they, the
neerer they draw by death to heaven, God's Spirit and all
goodnesse groweth more quick and active in them."

The temptation to find a plagiarism where there is
no more than a parallel, is often misleading, yet it is
perfectly possible that Waller either heard or read
these words, in an age when worldlings often listened
to sermons, and the horizon of the pulpit was wider
than it is now. On the other hand, when Fuller says
in the same discourse " It is the greatest misery that
one has once been happy," the resemblance to Dante
is probably due to no other cause than the same im-
pression made at different epochs upon a thoughtful
mind by the vicissitudes of a troubled world.

" All truths," says Fuller, " have Eagle's eyes," and
if his thoughts can face without flinching the sunlight
of long experience, it is because they have in them the
strength of vision which belongs to perennial truth.
His deepest prejudices were perhaps anti-Papal ; yet
this does not prevent him, when it was dangerous to
say so, from maintaining that no just offence is to be
given to the Papists ; or from defending this opinion
in a passage which is nothing less than statesmanlike:

"Know, Sir," he writes, "that besides those Papists in
England and Ireland to whom you say the Parliament hath

FULLER'S SERMONS 45

proclaimed an irreconcileable war, there be also many of
their Religion in Spaine, France, Germany, Italy, Poland,
&c., all Europe over, with whom the Parliament hath not as
yet professed open hostility, and to these no offence must be
given. The eye of all Christendom is upon us; the Sea
surrounds, but doth not conceale us. Present Papists read
the text of our actions, and their posterity will write com-
ments upon them : we cannot, therefore, be too wary."

Again, in the interpretation of many parts of Old
Testament history we in these days are often en-
cumbered with the help that modern criticism offers
towards the solution of a moral doubt, and have to
confess ourselves disgusted with the transparent artifice
which tries to smother up a difficulty in a phrase.
When Milman explains the incident of " the enemies
of Elijah struck by fifties with lightning," by saying,
" The prophets had been infected by the ferocity of
the times ; " the merest child can see that he is
absolutely incoherent ; and that to those who accept,
as he does, the narrative as true, the suggestion that
ltd central fact was altogether due to the working of
human passions, must be absurdly false. Far more
sane, consistent, and reverent, while not less true to
that better spirit of which Christians are, is Fuller's
comment, which has at least the permanence which
belongs to a faith at unity with itself:

" Elijah, who cursed the Captaines with their fifties, could
cause fire to come down on them from Heaven. It appears
that his curse was pronounced without malice, because in-
flicted by a miracle. It is lawfuU for such to call for fire.

i

46 FULLER'S SERMONS

who can make fire come at their call ; and would none
would kindle discord on Earth, till they first fetcht the
sparks thereof from Heaven."

And, whilst we are not now concerned with Fuller's
doctrinal tenets, it is worth while to notice that his in-
clination is to survey controversy in its length and
breadth, and historic consequences in something of
the humane and judicial spirit of Hooker, and there-
fore its less sinister aspects do not escape him. He
reminds us, as Newman has reminded us, that heresies
may turn to profit in " clearing of truth " :

" Her old Evidences which have been long neglected will
then be searched and found out ; her rusty Arguments will
be scoured over and furbished up. Many will run to and
fro, and knowledge shall be increased. Those which before
shooting at the Truth, were over, under, or wide, will now,
with the left-handed Gibeonites, hit the mark at a haires
breadth, and faile not : Many parts of true Doctrine have
bin slenderly guarded, till once they were assaulted by
Heretikes : and many good Authors in those points which
were never opposed, have written but loosely, and suffered
unwary passages to fall from their posting pens. But when
theeves are about the countrey, every one will ride with his
sword and stand on his guard : when Heretikes are abroad
in the world, Writers weigh each word, ponder each phrase,
that they may give the enemies no advantage."

Even when he would be most severe he seems to
divert the shaft when he intends to point it, by some
gentle touch which turns the eye elsewhere, as when
he says : " As children used to say, they love Father

FULLER'S SERMONS 47

and Mother both best : so let us hate Heresies and
Schisms both worst." And when Mr. John Saltmarsh
Pastor of Hesterton, Yorkshire, attacking Fuller's
Sermon of Reformation, affirms, in that queer Puritan
phraseology, which was often so curiously infelicitous,
that "We may have Beames and Radiations and
Shootings which our Fathers had not," it is with a
kind of whimsical sadness that Fuller seizes upon an
opening which would be obvious even to a man of less
ready wit in 1643 •

" For Beames and Radiation of knowledge," he says, " I
have delivered my oppinion; but as for Shootings^ God
knows we have many, such as our Fathers never had. God
in his mercy cease such Shootings^ or else in his Justice
direct the BuUetts to such markes as in truth have been the
troublers of our Israel."

A temper so remote from fanaticism, an under-
standing so clear as his, was unable to lose, in
enthusiasm for a cause, the sense of the horrors with
which its struggles were accompanied. Surveying the
whole arena with impartial eyes he cannot see the
generic differences between the combatants which we,
who judge from typical examples, are accustomed to
find ; hedoesnoteven see, with Chillingworth,"publicans
and sinners on the one side and scribes and Pharisees
on the other." In his "Fast Sermon on Innocents'
Day," preached at the Savoy in 1642, he was on very
treacherous ground ; his audience may have been for
the most part in sympathy with him ; but his undis-
guised loyalty and conspicuous powers must have

48 FULLER'S SERMONS

made him already an object of suspicion to the
authorities then dominant in the capital. Neverthe-
less it is the boast of superior godliness on the Par-
liamentarian side that he is deprecating, and he seems
to be addressing Roundheads rather than Royalists,
when he says :

" The general hindrance (to Peace) is this : — ^The many
national sinnes of our kingdome being not repented of. I
say of our kingdome, not of one Army alone. Thinke not
that the King's Army is like Sodome^ not ten righteous men
in it (no, not if righteous Lot himselfe be put into the
number) ; and the other Army like Zion consisting all of
Saints. No : there be drunkards on both sides, and swearers
on both sides, and whoremongers on both sides ; pious on
both sides, and prophane on both sides ; like Jeremies figges,
those that are good are very good, and those that are bad are
very bad in both parties. I never knew nor heard of an
Army all of Saints, save the holy army of Martyrs s and those,
you know, were dead first; for the last breath they sent forth
proclaimed them to be Martyrs."

The novelist and even the historian have found an
easier theme in the strong contrasts between the
Wildrakes and the Sergeants Bind-their-Kings-in-
Chains, between Laud and Hugh Peters, than in the
many lights and shades which belong to every great
national struggle, as to the most trivial scene of human
life. Whether we condemn or praise the Fullers and
the Falklands in days of storm and stress, it is from
these, the men whose proper province is thought
rather than action, the Hamlets of a world out of

FULLER'S SERMONS 49

joint, who look about them with doubt and misgiving
amid the tragic scenes in which they are compelled to
take a part, without the stem joy of the warrior or the
fiery zeal of the partisan to blind them, from these
that we must learn that the strife of passions or
principles on the large scale is like the encounter of
two mighty floods, each of which bears along with it
to the final collision a mingled mass of things precious
and things vile. It is good sometimes for those who
would know the whole truth to converse with the
divisions of Reuben in which there are great search-
ings of heart, and even with Asher whilst he abides in
his breaches. At the battle of Edgehill, Harvey, the
discoverer of the circulation of the blood, sits under a
hedge with the two young princes in his charge, and
reads a book, until an impertinent " bullet of a great
gun " disturbs him. ^The picture may serve as a type
of the gentler influences and humanities in evil days
working still amid the whirlwind and the fire which
menace but cannot destroy them. It is at once rest-
ful and helpful to turn the mild light of literature upon
history, and thus to discover beautiful and unexpected
amenities in fierce times, and a culture or a piety
which acknowledged kindred spirits irrespective of
faction. Let us modify, for instance, the severe and
contemptuous judgment of Clarendon upon Sir John
Danvers, the regicide, by the pages before us, which
remind us that he was an indulgent stepfather to
George Herbert, and, even in the crisis which has
tarnished his name, the friend and protector of Thomas

E

50 FULLER'S SERMONS

Fuller. He was one of the only two civilians in that
strange assize whom the King recognized as known
to him before the troubles, indeed " he had been gentle-
man of the Privy Chamber to Charles, when Prince of
Wales"; and his part should have been as unwel-
come to him as it was certainly ungracious. The
strange companionship between him and Fuller is
perhaps none the less pleasant to contemplate, because
it is perplexing. His needs and his ambitions lAdy
have confused his motives, and yet left him a genuine
sympathy with a man whom the times might sadden,
but could not corrupt or beguile. We hive linked
once already Fuller's name with Falkland's ; and we
cannot better close the remarks suggested by these
volumes than with some words of Fuller in which the
sad, despondent accents of Falkland's last days seem
to be anticipated :

" If I should chance to be stricken dumbe, I would with
Zacharia make signes for table bookes and write that the
name of that which I desire above all earthly things is Peace."

LETTERS OF THE
EARL OF CHESTERFIELD^

CHESTERFIELD is now known chiefly as an
educator of youth ; and in that character he does
not shine. So different is his moral standpoint from
our own, that we can scarcely conceive a state of society
in which such precepts could have been read by any
class of people without some sense of repulsion. Nor,
although Lord Carnarvon is of a different opinion,
were we able to discover in the later letters addressed
to the godson any indications of a change of tone. If
his suggestions then were never quite so profligate, it
must be remembered that his second pupil was only a
child ; the presence of the old leaven is for all that
unmistakable. We are convinced that there was no
reformation. The old man had begun to weave a new
web for the godson seven years before the son received
his last admonitions ; and it would be an easy, but
rather painful task, to prove in detail that the fabric of
the garment, by no means a garment of righteousness,

* "Chesterfield's Letters." Edited by Dr. Bradshaw. (Son-
nenschein.)

52 CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

which he provided for both his disciples, was of the
same material. How, indeed, could it be otherwise ?
Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh ;
and Chesterfield's heart, naturally generous, was in
some respects vitiated by the tolerance of his age for
immorality in high places, and by a theory of life
hard, narrow, and cynical. " To talk of natural affec-
tion is talking nonsense," he says. He remarks that
a parent and child who had never met before would
not recognize one another at their first meeting, and
he considered this a conclusive proof of his general
thesis. Women, in his judgment, were to be trifled
with, but never seriously consulted; creatures for whom
no flattery was either two high or too low. At the
age of fourteen, the son, certainly with some warrant,
thought to please the father by speaking unfavourably
of that sex ; the only rebuke which he received was a
reminder "from history" that men had done much
more mischief; and the child is advised " not to trust
either more than was absolutely necessary." He warns
his son, and his godson afterwards, that they may pos-
sibly merit his aversion; and that if once he quarrels
with them, he will never forgive. Perhaps one result
of this admonition was that the son married without
his father's consent, leaving a widow and two children.
But Chesterfield's practice was more amiable than his
theory in this instance. If he received Mrs. Eugenia
Stanhope coldly, he treated both her and her boys
with essential kindness; and if he relapsed into the
same severe tone with his godson, it was perhaps

CHESTERFIELD^S LETTERS S3

because an old man's language is often less flexible
than his heart.

It is wonderful that a man who attributed the in-
firmities of his age in part to the excesses of his youth
should not have been, if not more positive in prevent-
ing, at least more guarded against suggesting vice,
where the propensities of the young are so apt to take
a hint from their elders for the worse. But the truth is
that, for all his superior insight, deteriora sequi was for
him not so much a blemish as a necessity ; what men
of his rank and degree of culture habitually did was a
law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not
His Letters serve a better purpose than that for which
he designed them ; they are a standing evidence of
the danger of that common theory which regards
certain vices as inevitable. Carefully as he watched
his son's career, there was one part of the temptations
to which youth is exposed, in which he sometimes
gave a general encouragement to evil, whilst as to
particular instances he deliberately and avowedly re-
mained in ignorance. He calls him in one place, but
with not the slightest evidence of censure, a dissipated
young man of twenty ; yet it is clear that the lad's
leading propensity was to study ; his father is mani-
festly alarmed lest his education in the manners and
graces, in which he was certainly sadly lacking, should
be further impeded by his devotion to his book, and it
is, therefore, all the more remarkable that he should
have chosen for his governor the Rev. Mr. Harte, of
whose social qualities Chesterfield thought very little,

54 CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

vrfao was, in fact, if we may infer anything from the
manner in which he speaks of him, just one of those
awkward scholars upon whom he is never tired of
pouring contempt. But the awkwardness of the pupil,
whatever it may have been, was not the awkwardness
of a stupid lout ; Boswell, a most competent observer,
remembered him as the Resident at Dresden, and de-
clares that though he could not boast of the graces,
he was, in truth, a sensible, civil, well-behaved man.
One of his faults is more often found combined with
intelligence than with dullness ; his father blames him
as critical and disputatious ; proof that independent
observation and study were more to him than parental
advice. One instance of this remains : on a set of
political precepts which his father had inclosed to him
was found written in Philip Stanhope's handwriting,
" Excellent maxims, but more calculated for the meri-
dian of France or Spain than of England." It may
be that he here puts his finger upon the real defect of
a statesmanship rather acute than robust ; more sym-
pathetic with foreign than domestic modes of thought,
and consequently perhaps more really successful, as it
certainly won a greater reputation, in dealing with
Irish than with English politics. Chesterfield writes
in 1758 : " I am glad you have connected your nego-
tiations and anecdotes ; and, I hope, not with your
usual laconism." Laconism, when it is critical, is some-
times a formidable weapon; and he may have had
some uncomfortable inklings of its possible strength.
Perhaps we made too much of this one spark from

CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS SS

a small and long-extinguished fire; but it is some-
times given us to guess the general texture of a mind
from a very few threads. At any rate, we cannot help
feeling a little pathetic interest in this somewhat
shadowy figure, whose failings have been roistered
amply,and probably with exaggeration ; whose troubles,
and perhaps better affections, only come to us through
the refrigerating medium of his father's correspond-
ence; who certainly underwent some humiliations
through the circumstances of his birth ; and who, in a
more democratic age, or wherever social and courtly
influences were no bar to intrinsic worth, might have
played, if not a more conspicuous, at least a more
useful and congenial part.

Well read in Latin and Greek, in French, Italian,
and German literature, the son remained a rugged
Englishman to the last. Chesterfield not only wrote
well, but almost thought, in French ; his criticism both
of life and letters is on the French model ; his English
idiom is tainted from the same source, not, perhaps, so
much from affectation as from mere habit We can
scarcely turn a page without encountering such Gal-
licisms as —

" The best scholar of a gentleman ; it is equal to
me ; your whole turns upon the company you keep ;
in the public; upon your subject ; profit of it ; of the
one side and of the other ; the affairs of its interior ; to
give the French the changed

Even in the limited intellectual pabulum in which
he indulged himself his habitual choice was more

S6 CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

limited still ; it is easy to see in what pastures he
delighted to feed ; thus the statement that " all atten-
tions are repaid, though real obligations are not," is
characteristic of a man bred upon Rochefoucauld and
Voltaire. The self-sufficiency which so often mars
even the best French criticism Chesterfield exhibits in
a ludicrous degree. The only Italian poets worth
reading are Ariosto and Tasso ; Dante, he says, he
could never understand, and, therefore^ had done with
him, fully convinced that he was not worth the pains.
Of Voltaire's " Sifecle de Louis Quatorze," he says that
" Weak minds will not like it, even though they do
not understand it ; which is commonly the measure of
their admiration." It would have been well for his
own reputation as a critic if he had been guilty of
this weakness instead of another weakness still more
contemptible. His remarks upon Greek literature are
curious and, in their way, instructive, as illustrating
both the condition of these studies in his time and the
bias of his own mind. As his boy, at the age of
sixteen, desired an establishment in England in pre-
ference to a foreign appointment, he jocularly sug-
gests that he should become a Greek professor at
one of our Universities, a very pretty sinecure, re-
quiring very little knowledge — ^**much less, I hope,
than you have already" — of that language. Greek
ought to share some part of every day: not the
Greek poets, the " catches " of Anacreon, or the " tender
complaints" of Theocritus, or "even the porter-like
language of Homer's heroes," but Plato, Aristoteles,

CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 57

Demosthenes, and Thucydides. Yet of Plato, as of
Cicero, he remarks that " It is their eloquence only
that has preserved and transmitted them down to us
through so many centuries ; for the philosophy of them
is wretched, and the reasoning part miserable."

This being his estimate of these great writers, it is
not surprising that, at the convenient season, the study
of them is put in proper subordination to more serious
pursuits. The ruling ambition survives even in our
ashes, and as a Cambridge Don of considerable
classical acquirements, but also a good cricketer in his
day, is said to have declared, " I would rather hit a
good smack to leg than write Plato ; " so Chesterfield
affirms " I had rather that you were passionately in
love with some determined coquette of condition (who
would lead you a dance, fashion, supple, and polish
you) than that you knew all Plato and Aristotle by
heart." An account which he gives of Berkeley's
philosophy is, of course, sad rubbish, and it is scarcely
necessary to say that he repeats the common cant of
the connoisseur of his generation about the rude, un-
cultivated genius of Shakespeare, whom a better
education would have saved "from many extrava-
gances and much nonsense." We suspect that he
would have said much more to the same purpose if
the world had not already made up its mind on the
subject. How small a place Shakespeare really had
in his thoughts is, perhaps, manifest from a single
instance. He has occasion to introduce the Earl of
Huntingdon to Madame du Boccage, and he preserits

S8 CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

him as a descendant in the direct line of that '^ Milord
Hasting^s" who plays so considerable a part in the
tragedy, which the lady has doubtless read, of " Jane
Shore." It is almost impossible not to fret, even when
one laughs, at an egotism so narrow and even stupid
as Chesterfield's about certain departments of culture.
He held music in sovereign contempt, as an occupa-
tion quite unfit for a gentleman ; it is not even, like
painting and sculpture, a liberal art, although to his
disgust it is beginning to be thought so. A gentleman
who loves music will get his piping and fiddling done
for him ; if he does it for himself he puts himself in a
very frivolous and contemptible light. The vulgariz-
ing effect of such trivial pursuits would, it appears, be
seriously detrimental to the refining influence of the
sedulous endeavours, so religiously inculcated, to break
the Seventh Commandment Perhaps we have said
more than enough of the moral shortcomings revealed
in this collection, but we must quote one instance of
social insincerity which a comparison of letters brings
to light Madame de Cursay, mother of Madame de
Monconseil, had been seriously ill. Chesterfield tells
the daughter that his son had informed him of this
circumstance with the keen concern that gratitude
ought to inspire, assures her that he had shared her
justes alarmesy and that he shared also her rejoicing
at the convalescence, "je ne dis pas d'une mfere,
mais d'une amie si ch^re." To his son he writes in
response to the letter telling him of the old lady's
illness :

CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 59

"If old Cursay goes to the Valley of Jehoshaphat, I
cannot help it; it will be an ease to our fHend, Madame
Monconseil, who, I believe, maintains her, and a little will
not satisfy her in any way "

This duplicity is characteristic of the manners of an
age which r^arded directness and plain honesty of
speech as a note of bad breeding ; in strong contrast
with our own time, when brusqueness is a polite art,
and elaborate courtesy is a trifle vulgar. According to
Chesterfield only a John Trot would say to a newly-
married man, " Sir, I wish you much joy ; " or to a
man who has lost a son, " Sir, I am sorry for your
loss ; " a well-bred man will advance with warmth,
vivacity, and a cheerful countenance to the one, and,
embracing him, will say, "If you do justice to my
attachment to you, you will judge of the joy that I
feel upon this occasion better than I can express it ; "
whilst to the other he will adopt a grave composure of
countenance and a lower voice, and say, " I hope you
do me the justice to be convinced that I feel whatever
you feel, and shall ever be affected when you are
concerned."

Not only our present manners but our present
speech would have seemed vulgar to Chesterfield.
We note, after Dr. Bradshaw, that to him " sensible "
meant "sensitive," its present use, according to Johnson,
being restricted to " low " conversation. Chesterfield
apologizes for using the vulgar expression, " The will
will be taken for the deed." " To be in high spirits " he
describes as a silly term then becoming fashionable.

6o CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

All proverbs and trite sayings, such as " Tit for tat,"
or " What is one man's meat is another man's poison,"
he held in special abhorrence. The son is cautioned
not to use " namely " because it is Scriptural. Chester-
field would have scorned the man who professed him-
self obleiged^ instead of obleeged to him. Pronunciation
has the ups and downs of two buckets in a well ; the
vulgarism of one generation is the standard usage of
the next, and vice versd. But Chesterfield's authority
has prevailed on one point. When Johnson published
the " Plan for his Dictionary," he was told by Chester-
field that the word great should be pronounced so as
to rhyme to state^ whilst Sir William Yonge affirmed
that it should rhyme to seat^ and that none but an
Irishman would pronounce Itgrait ; when, as he says,
the best speaker in the House of Lords, and the best
speaker in the House of Commons thus differed
entirely, the wise lexicographer represented both
sounds as equally defensible by authority, and gave
instances of both from English verse.

Chesterfield's very limited acquaintance even with
the writings of that Augustan age, as it is strangely
called, which was well within the range of his life, is
strikingly exhibited in his description oi humour. To
him, as to us, the humourist is he who seizes and
depicts, not he who is guilty of the absurd or whimsical ;
and to this effect he writes to some anonymous French
lady, in correction of the Abb6 le Blanc's " Lettres
d'un Francois" in 1745. We have little doubt that
the Abb6 derived his notion of the word from a

CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 6i

literature then scarcely more than thirty years old ;
at any rate, he could easily have justified himself from
the " Spectator " — a strange shifting of the point of
view within one generation. From these letters we
discover that "unwell" was in the middle of the
last century an Irishism^ to describe a middle
state between health and sickness ; while many a
careless speaker now may be comforted to know that
the great Chesterfield is guilty of writing "between
you and I."

Narrow as was Chesterfield's scope in the province
of letters, it must in fairness be admitted that upon
his own ground he is often clear-sighted enough. His
criticism of the French writing fashionable in the
middle of the eighteenth century, its affectations, its
neologisms, its quest of Pesprit, invitd Minervdy is
probably quite just ; like Ixion, he says, such writers
embrace a cloud instead of the goddess they are pursu-
ing ; he was right in preferring to all this the luminous
and effortless precision of Voltaire. He cleverly says
in French of a certain writer of the galimatias in
vogue, that —

" God never meant men to think after that fashion, any
more than He meant them to walk on their hands with their
feet in the air, although, by persevering eflfort, they have
succeeded in doing both the one and the other."

His lucidity and point, unmistakably of French
origin, excited the surprise and admiration, and even
perhaps the genuine envy of the French correspondents
on whom he returned their own native products with

62 CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

increase ; and the same traits frequently enliven his
English letters. Count Sinzendorf, for instance, the
Imperial Minister, left the Hague one Sunday morn-
ing, declaring with an air of mystery that he was going
to see some of the province and might possibly go to
Spa : " But for my own part," writes Chesterfield to
Lord Townshend, " as I know the gentleman, I do not
believe the mystery is upon account of the journey,
but I rather believe that he takes the journey for the
sake of the mystery."

More severe still is his sarcasm on that mad-brained
and most uncomfortable creature, the father of
Frederick the Great, who made his son swear, among
many other things, that he would never believe the
doctrine of predestination ! " A very unnecessary de-
claration," says Chesterfield, "for anybody who has
the misfortune of being acquainted with him to make,
since Providence can never be supposed to have pre-
ordained such a creature ! "

His abilities in this way were more amiably exer-
cised in plajnng lightly with the infirmities of his old
age ; to his well-known moty " Tyrawley and I have
been dead these two years, but we do not wish it to be
generally known," we might add his willingness to
part with his " hereditary right " to deafness " to any
Minister to whom hearing is often disagreeable, or to
any fine woman, to whom it is often dangerous." In
spite of his own urgent advice, " abstain carefully from
satire," it is impossible that he could have kept this
dangerous power constantly under control ; and there

CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 63

is probably some truth in Lord Hervey's statement
that "from his propensity to ridicule he was rather
Kked than loved."

When Chesterfield proposed a certain name to
George II., and the monarch angrily said, "I would
rather have the devil," the Minister reminded him
that the personage he preferred must be addressed
in the commission as "our trusty and well-beloved
cousin." George may have laughed, but we have a
suspicion that the ready humour here displayed was
not always really acceptable to a king in whose com-
position, according to Chesterfield, everything was
little, who loved to act the king but mistook the part,
and in whom the Royal dignity shrunk into the
Electoral pride. It is to Chesterfield's honour, perhaps,
that in spite of his acknowledged grace of manner he
was not successful as a courtier. He avowed a pro-
found mistrust of George II., based, it may be, in part
upon those conversations, in which he affirms the
character of kings is best discovered. He imputes
to him the same treachery which stained the greater
name of Marlborough ; he more than insinuates that
the failure of the expedition to Brest was brought
about by Court intrigue ; and speaks of the bugbear of
a French invasion, kept alive, he says, regardless of
grammar, by " I know who, and I know why." Great
as were his own merits as a politician, he was able to
despise, but unable to dispense with some of the
practices of a corrupt time ; he writes that " his son
will be brought into Parliament without opposition,

64 CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

but not gratis;'' and ten years later he assists in a
n^otiation by which the young man, who, as resident
in an official position abroad, could not possibly have
discharged his duty as a member of the House of
Commons, is to vacate his seat *' for a valuable con-
sideration, meaning tnon^r This more than acquies- *
cence in certain arrangements as necessary evils is
characteristic of the man ; and we trace at once
cynicism and irony in his style when, in attempting to
give some notion of the delays and absurd difficulties
that arose in a negotiation with the United Provinces —

"Represent to yourself," he writes, "an English Minister
endeavouring to carry a point by the single merit of the point
itself, without the assistance of reward and punishments,
through what patriots would call an independent and un-
biassed House of Commons — that is, an assembly of people
influenced by everything but by the Court, and then judge
how soon and how easily it would pass ! "

He himself suffered by the methods which he here
describes. In 1732 he opposed Walpole's Excise
scheme, and was in consequence deprived of his white
staff; yet at a later date he recommends to Newcastle
vindictive proceedings of much the same kind as the
only way to secure a stable administration. On the
topic of clemency there is indeed a strange incongruity
between Chesterfield's language on various occasions,
due rather to the fact that, whether through conviction
or prejudice, the circumstances seemed to him to be
radically different, than to any vicissitudes in a temper
so controlled and equable as his. His mild but firm

CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 6$

administration of Ireland was marred by no trepida-
tion. * He was told one morning that the people of
Connaught were rising. He took out his watch and
said simply, " It is nine o'clock, and certainly time for
them to rise." Yet at the very same date he was
using, with respect to the rebels in Scotland, language
so savage that if we did not know the man we should
certainly attribute it to the anger which not uncom*
monly goes hand in hand with panic. Had the
" Butcher " Cumberland been under his instructions he
might fairly have pleaded that he had not exceeded
them. "Let the Duke put all to fire and sword."
" The Commander-in-Chief should be ordered to give
no quarter, but to pursue and destroy the rebels
wherever he finds them." So wrote a wise and sym
pathetic ruler, who in his general correspondence ex-
hibits a disgust, then uncommon among statesmen,
even at such horrors as are inevitable in any form ol
warfare.

Chesterfield's Lord-Lieutenancy was of brief dura-
tion, and from it we cannot discover how far he would
have been able to grapple with immediate public
dangers, which never in fact troubled him during his
stay in Ireland. His interest in that country did not
terminate with his office, and he was wont, on the
strength of his Lieutenancy, to call himself an Irish-
man ; he maintained a constant correspondence upon
Irish affairs with Dr. Chenevix, Bishop of Waterford,
(who had formerly been his chaplain at the Hague), with
Mr. Thomas Prior, and with Alderman Faulkner, a

F

66 CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

gentleman who answers exactly to Mr. Boffin's de-
scription of Mr. Silas Wegg as "a literary party
with a wooden leg."* At times Chesterfield's tone
in these letters is more cheerful than we could have
anticipated; and did we not remember how low
was his estimate of our English education, especially
at Westminster, then perhaps our representative
school, we should be surprised at his conviction
that the state of schools and of university education
in Ireland was better than ours ; just as we stumble
at his more general declaration, made, it is true, at
a time of great national despondency here, that the
prospects of Ireland were more hopeful than those
of England! But Cassandra is never long absent
from the elbow of the Irish historian or statesman.
The extravagance and dissipation which Chesterfield
regretted in 1746 Burke was still regretting fifty
years later : " Except in your claret," writes Chester-
field, "which you are very solicitous should be two or
three years old, you think less of two or three years
hence than any people under the sun."

With a laudable zeal to promote Irish industries,
he urges the manufacture of glass bottles : " Consider-
ing," he says, " the close connection there is between
bottles and claret, I should hope that this manufacture,
though your own^ may meet with encouragement" He
suggests that every Irishman should make as many

^ This leg Foote had the inhumanity to ridijcule upon the
stage. He was properly punished by an accident which led to
the amputation of his own.

CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 67

bottles as he empties. He was keenly alive to the
mischiefs of civil disabilities for the Irish Romanists ;
and would have them tied down " by the tender but
strong bonds of landed property." But his great merit
is that he saw the necessity of moral as well as me-
chanical reform ; and it is this insight that prompts
him to exclaim, "When Ireland is no longer de-
pendent upon England, the Lord have mercy upon it."
If we regret that with him, as with most politicians of
his day, the peasantry of Ireland are much in the
background, we must note at the same time his de-
claration, when the Whiteboys in 1764 had been
troublesome, that " if the military force had killed half
as many landlords it would have contributed more
effectually to restore quiet"* At a time when the
Lord-Lieutenants were generally governed by the
dominant faction, and secured their own peace and
ignoble ease by keeping that satisfied, he resolved " to
take trouble upon himself," and haughtily refused to
be the " first slave " of a set of unscrupulous and greedy
placemen. If expediency led him to insist on the
dangers to Ireland of " starting points which ought
never to have been mentioned at all," his determina-
tion to see things with his own eyes marks one of the
best elements in his character. He had, besides, that
cosmopolitan temper, so much needed, and yet so
lamentably wanting in our past treatment of the Irish

^ He adds : "The poor people in Ireland are used worse than
negroes by their lords and masters, and their deputies of deputies
of deputies."

i

68 CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

problem. His contempt of the pride of birth was no
pretence ; and he was certainly equally exempt from
the pride of race. In one sense the most aristocratic
of aristocrats, good society meant for him not neces-
sarily well-born, but always well-bred and accom-
plished people ; and his strict inculcation of courtesy
to servants and inferiors was part of a humane spirit,
which acknowledged no natural inferiority, whether of
social status^ or of nationality. He notices with
censure the contempt of historians for humanity in
general, and no Socialist orator in Trafalgar Square
could more strongly denounce the ambition of crowned
heads, whose principal business, according to him, was
the extermination of their fellow-creatures. When he
waxes hot upon this theme he sometimes sacrifices
truth to epigram. " Happy were it for England," he
exclaims, "happy for the world, if there were not
great kings in it," forgetting that the weakness of
monarchs has caused at least as great miseries as their
power.

Of his prescience much has been written. He saw,
long before a storm was suspected, the cloud small as
a man's hand which was to gather into the French
Revolution. He guessed the incapacity which, at least
for many generations, the French people exhibited for
Constitutional government. "Vous savez faire des
barricades mais vous n'^l^verez jamais des barri^res,"

^ Occasional expressions notwithstanding. '^ Gout," he says,
'* is the distemper of a gentleman, whereas the rheumatism is
the distemper of a hackney-coachman or chairman."

CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 69

he says in words which read rather like history than
prophecy. He foretold the extinction of the temporal
power of the Papacy; yet to long-sighted people things
remote are often more visible than things near, and
on the eve of England's second heroic age he seems to
have had scarcely any suspicion of the commanding
genius of Pitt, whom nevertheless he helped to his
brilliant ascendancy. He was an able diplomatist,
and these letters would enable us, if we had space, to
give detailed instances of his skill. He did not disdain
to bring his social qualities into the game ; and often
by means of dadina^^e discovered some things which he
wanted to know. His methods of policy were in every
direction quiet and unobtrusive ; thus he boasts that
it was his resignation of the Secretaryship of State
that made the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, by opening
people's eyes to the imminent dangers of the war. He
had the invaluable art of concealing his ignorance
with dexterity ; his most famous achievement is per-
haps the reform of the Calendar, yet he declares that
of all the substantial part of his brilliant speech upon
that measure he did not himself understand a word.
Long before his decease he wrote as one for whom the
idle dream of this world was over ; yet he emerged
from his obscurity to urge with success upon the king
that alliance between Pitt and Newcastle, which was
the first step to the restoration of our prestige abroad
through a series of glorious triumphs by land and sea.
A safe reputation such as his has a peculiar fascina-
tion, because it leaves so much room for conjecture.

i

TO CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS

More adventurous characters give the historian many
more topics for praise or blame, but the colours in
which they are painted are fast and clear, and specula-
tion is displaced by some positive judgment where
men have done all that it was possible for them to do.
The Chesterfields of politics leave us problems none
the less interesting because they are insoluble; and
we are constantly asking, though with no prospect of
reply, whether their reserve was due to self-knowledge
or to magnanimity, and whether, if they would, they
could have achieved more.

ARNOLD'S ESSAYS IN CRITICISM

Second Series

IT is not too soon to try to estimate Matthew Ar-
nold's work as a critic. Long before his too early
death he had done for us all he could. He had given
vogue to modes of thought and judgment which were
once rare amongst Englishmen. He would have dis-
claimed, with some repugnance, the suggestion that he
had a method. But if he had not a method, he had a
mystery, an open secret, t \^G hahit of g#>i>ing <*Ygty
^ject before him in a perspective of wid e culture and
observation. He taught u s to have this aim , and,
given the requisite breadth and knowledge —

" Most can raise the flower now
For all have got the seed."

That " WorldJ-iterature " which was the dream of
Goethe, a literature exempt from the prejudices and
eccentricities which national isolation begets, and
always making mute appeal to a tribunal, if not cos-
mopolitan at least European, has through Matthew
Arnold become more possible for us. In many cases,
thereforeTTF^came easy to foresee what Matthew

72 ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS

Arnold would say» if not exactly lunv he would say it
But there was, besides, in his criticism a personal
element against which, for a thoroughly justjudgmeht,
itls'iJways'nec essary t obe on our guard. It gave him
currency, it made him delightfiilly readable ; we would
not have missed it for the world. Let it amuse us ;
" we are none of us," he would himself say, *' likely to
be lively much longer," and some of the gaiety of
criticism is already eclipsed with him. But let us
remember that wherever this personal element appears
there is no longer the single eye, and the mark is not
always hit

In one direction, indeed, this personal element
covered a very large extent of ground. He claime d
for cult ure an e mpire which it never could achieve
w ithout a complete chaiige olj^liaracter. He had, we
believe, a sincere sympathy with the devoted labourer
in the work oi social reformation, but he often dis-
sembled his love, and, to a world oblivious of nice
distinctions, he seemed like a well-dressed stranger
criticising the workman in the gravel-pit below for the
inevitable soils and tatters of his clothes. The motto
which Mr. Frederic Harrison has chosen for his dia-
logue on " Culture " :

" The sovereign'st thing on earth
Was parmaceti for an inward bruise,"

suggested a picture, consolatory to the wounded
feelings of many a Hotspur in the battle of life. We
take up Matthew Arnold's last volume and we light
upon this :

ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS . 73

"The * scientific system of thought ' in Wordsworth gives
us at last such poetry as this, which the devout Words-
wofithiaii accepts :

' O for the coming of that glorious time
When, prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth
And best protection, this Imperial Reahn,
While she exacts allegiance, shall admit
An obligation, on her part, to tecich
Them who are bom to serve her and obey ;
Binding herself by statute to secure.
For all the children whom her soil maintains,
The rudiments of letters, and inform
The mind with moral and religious truth.'

Wordsworth calls Voltaire dull, and surely the production of
these un-Voltairian lines must have been imposed on him as
a judgment ! One can hear them being quoted at a Social
Science Congress; one can call up the whole scene. A
great room in one of our dismal provincial towns ; dusty air
and jaded afternoon daylight; benches full of men with
bald heads and women in spectacles ; an orator lifting up
his face from a manuscript vrritten within and without to
declaim these lines of Wordsworth ; and in the soul of any
poor child of nature who may have wandered in thither, an
unutterable sense of lamentation, and mourning, and woe ! "

Now this is amusing, and possibly true and ad-
mirable, as a piece of literary criticism ; but would
not any one who did not know the writer and the field
of survey which he claimed for himself, suppose that
we had here a fastidious cBsthete^ a spirit altogether
too delicate, too much impressed by external uncome-
liness, to deal with questions of moral evil at all?

i

74 ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS

Alas ! the centres of so much moral ugliness are apt
to be themselves ugly, |and too much working or
thinking about these things commonly ends in bald
heads and spectacles ; but to serious minds, who re-
member that poetry is often stimulating and fruitful
out of all proportion to its aesthetic merit, Matthew
Arnold's criticism upon this particular passage of
Wordsworth will inevitably, to the obscuring of all
that he really wishes to convey, suggest the reflection
that what with the children of nature whom he desires
to multiply and the children of nature who multiply
themselves only too fast, bald heads and spectacles
are likely to be on the increase among us. We must
add that if, as Matthew Arnold is never tired of telling
us, Uterature is "a criticism of life " ; if " the strongest
part oTour religion to-day is its unconscious poetry " ;
if we are one day to learn to say, " Poetry is the
reality, philosophy the illusion," the province ofj)oetry
is by these propositipns. made so"vH3e7 the task com-
mitted to her so enormous, and all her extant ap-
paratus so insufficient for her pressing needs, that even
the inferior parts of her workmanship which find
favour with "'those bold bad men,' the haunters of
social science congresses," will prove very serviceable.
But the truth is that the propositions of enormous
reach, which the great critic was accustomed to use, are
many of them uqworkable dogmas, at many points
more demonstrably false tKan the articles of any
theological creed. He has contrasted literature and
dogma ; but literature herself abounds in dogmas, which

ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS 75

are only saved from sceptical attack because too much
is not at present claimed for them. " Beauty is truth ;
truth beauty," says Keats ; and we accept this now as
a stimulating and fruitful saying, giving a worthy aim
to men's efforts in art or letters, fixing men's eyes
upon remote but glorious possibilities, and perhaps
suggesting the faith that in some sphere beyond our
present ken the identity is already complete. But
conceive this bright fancy, so potent whilst it is left at
large in the province of the ims^nation, yet so ab-
solutely dogmatic in form, urged as a rule for the
practical guidance of life, and proclaimed by the high
priests of culture in all the churches of the future as
" the serious one thing needful " ; and what a revolt
against it there will be among poor mortals, who can
never be long oblivious of tangible or historic facts !
Truth is often ugly ; beauty is often illusion ; these
are counter-propositions which can scarcely be denied
even by the most transcendental mind. Inoperative
now, what powerful solvents they will then be, in com-
bination with the fear, not unwarranted by experience,
that beauty accepted for truth may mean for fallible
and impressionable men grace without morals ! And
the refinements and distinctions, however just and
true, by which these objections may be obviated, will
inevitably seem to be at least as sophistical and far-
fetched as the subtleties of any theologian in defence
or explanation of some doubtful and difficult text.
Matthew Arnold,^ criticising a passage from

^ Mixed Essays. A French Critic on Milton.

4

76 ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS

Macaulay's Essay on Milton, says of it, ** Substantial
meaning such lucubrations have none." We are
almost inclined to thank him for teaching us that
word. The passage to which he applies it is indeed
painfully rhetorical, and, after the manner of youthful
rhetoricians, precision is sacrificed to rhetoric. The
statement that " Milton wrote in an age of philosophers
and theologians " implies a distinction between Milton
and Dante, which, apart from the context, is wholly
misleading. Such antitheses as "the material or
immaterial system," " philosophically in the wrong,
but poetically in the right," betray the ambitious but
inexperienced penman. So we have written ; and
the words shall stand, as an evidence how far implicit
trust in Matthew Arnold may betray us. We must be
on our guard, he tells us, against the devout Words-
worthians. We must be on our guard, experience
proves, against the antagonists of Macaulay. Vulner-
able as he is, he has assuredly some protecting genius
who smites tAem with obliquity of vision at the moment
of attack. One accuses him of bad scholarship, and
makes a gross blunder in grammar in a familiar
passage of Greek. Another sets him right about
Claverhouse, and begins by giving Claverhouse the
wrong Christian name. Another accuses him of
garbling, and leaves off a crucial passage in the
middle. And here we have Matthew Arnold charg-
ing him with no meaning, and omitting from the
words which he adduces to prove his charge every
indication of their real purport. To use a vulgar but

ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS 77

expressive figure of speech the passage has been
simply ^^ gutted'^ It is, as we discover at once on
turning to the essay itself, Johnson who is really
responsible for the antithesis between the " material "
and the " immaterial system." He says, " the poet
should have secured the consistency of his system by
keeping immateriality out of sight, and seducing the
reader to drop it from his thoughts." To which
Macaulay in effect replies that this was impossible ;
that the tendencies, the modes of thought belonging
to Milton's time, forbade it ; that a sort of compromise
was necessary, if the poet was to engage " that half-
belief, which poetry requires." Matthew Arnold cites
with approval M. Scherer's dictum that " the funda-
mental conceptions of Paradise Lost have become
foreign to us." Well, Macaulay's dictum is that
Dante's conceptions of the spiritual world had become
foreign to the age of Milton. Why is the one dictum
wisdom and the other foolishness ?

On the other hand, Matthew Arnold himself is
constantly offering us the semblance of thoughts
which dissolve into airy nothings the moment we
attempt to give them " substantial mieaning " :

" Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, the sup-
posed fact ; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now
the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything ;
the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry
attaches its emotion to the idea ; the idea is the fact. The
strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious
poetry."

78 ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS

How can we help retorting here that this is sheer
nonsense; that '^ substantial meaning such lucubrations
have none " ? " Our religion has materialized itself in
the fact." Assuredly this implies a gradual deteriora-
tion ; an undue prominence given, in process of time,
to the fact, as compared with the ideas which the fact
may be supposed to symbolize. The historic truth, of
course, is that our religion from the very first, and
then most ardently, " attached its emotion to the fact "
or " the supposed fact." But for this it would have had
no existence. The disease, if disease it is, is congenital ;
nay, the very life of " our religion " (if by " our religion "
is meant Christianity) has been one "long disease."
This is so obvious that we are forced to suppose that
" our religion " means something less determinate — is,
in fact, another name for the religious emotions of
mankind, which, in as far as they are distinctively
Christian, have been " materialized." But then, " the
strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious
poetry." " Its unconscious poetry," observe ; that
poetry effortless, spontaneous, which flourishes every-
where in an atmosphere of beautiful legend, accepted
with implicit belief. But so little is this unconscious
poetry independent of the fact — that is, of course, of
belief in the fact — that when " the fact fails it," in
plain English when men cease to believe their legends,
their poetry is no longer unconscious, no longer
intensely emotional, no longer in any proper sense
religious. They pass consciously from belief to make-
believe, and Matthew Arnold would fain tempt us to

ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS 79

take make-believe for belief. But " surely in vain is
this net spread in the sight of any bird." The poetry
for which " the idea is everything," the poetry which
is content to take the idea for the fact, when the fact
fails it, may have every quality save one ; but it has
no religion in it. It may add much to the refinement
of life, but it has little controlling power over conscience
or conduct. The emotions which it excites are al-
together too superficial, too consciously aesthetic or
artistic, too much the result of a deliberate surrender
to illusion, to supply motive or principle. If these are
truisms, so much the worse for the vague but pre-
tentious generalities which the mere statement of
truisms can explode. " The house is falling about
your ears ; but never mind, it is still to all intents and
purposes a commodious mansion, for you can still
make a picture of it," is scarcely a parody of the sweet
and reasonable message which, in this and similar
passages, the Apostle of Culture conveys to the
Christian world.

And then that talk about " a world of illusion, of
divine illusion," surely, as he would himself say,
"imposed" upon the contemner of philosophy "as
a judgment" — ^the abstract character, without the
method, of metaphysics; the voice the voice of a
cautious and discerning Jacob, but the hands the
hands of a wild and rambling Esau, gathering from all
quarters his incongruous spoil ! That the phenomenal
world is a world of divine illusion, we are quite
pKjpared to believe ; albeit it is an opinion which

8o ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS

certainly owes its acceptance to the philosophy which
we are told is probably itself illusive. What else
there is anywhere which can properly be called
"divine illusion," we are unable to conceive. We know
no sense in which the illusion, whatever it may be
which belongs to the world of human thought and
emotion, can be said to be divine. Yet what is " the
rest " of which Matthew Arnold speaks above, if not
the whole world of nature and human life, exclusive
of the ideas which poetry thence gathers ? Definition,
indeed, is as difficult as respiration in these high
latitudes ; what Barrow says of wit is in place here —
we might as well attempt "to make a portrait of
Proteus, or to define the figure of the fleeting air."
" We must take," as Macaulay would say, " what mean-
ing we can get and be thankful." Or, better, we must
take concrete instances, and try to gain from these
some interpretation of a language at present too much
in the void. The Ariels of literature will, of course,
protest against any Philistine Sycorax who attempts
to fasten them thus as " within a cloven pine." But
they can expect no deliverer, if they are thus fixed,
not for refusing to serve us, but for pretending to be
executing supernatural ministries, while they are only
carrying out earthly behests. We open upon a passage
like this in the same essay from which we made our
last quotation :

" The world of Chaucer is fairer, richer, more significant
than that of Bums ; but when the largeness and freedom of
Bums get full sweep, as in * Tam o' Shanter,' or, still more,

ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS 8i

in that puissant and splendid production ' The Jolly Beg-
gars,' his world may be what it will, his poetic genius
triumphs over it. In the world of *The Jolly Beggars'
there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is bes-
tiality; yet the piece is a superb poetical success. It has
breadth, truth, and power which made the famous scene in
Auerbach's cellar, of Goethe's * Faust,' seem artificial and
tame be§ide it."

Ti' raiira irpoq Aiowtrov ; what have these things to do
with those solemn words which seemed to announce a
new cultus ? Poetry, superb poetry, sublimated out of
a coarse and bestial life — ^the thing is, we suppose,
conceivable to the aesthetic mind which knows nodiing
of moral scruples, and whether in Murillo's " Beggar
Boys " or in Bums's " Jolly Beggars " is prepared to
praise the efficient rendering of dirt ; but what a
transition we have made in the space of a few pages !
We seemed to have passed, as the traveller in Italy
passes, through the portico of a ruined temple into a
hovel. It is not enough to reply that the transition
is delicately managed; that Matthew Arnold has
previously told us that Bums's moralizing lacks that
** accent of high seriousness, bom of absolute sincerity,'*
which we find in Dante. For all this, he too clearly
shows us that the image of his idolatry has feet of clay.
For, given that with " high seriousness " or without it,
on themes the most exalted and themes the most
sordid and vile, superb poetry is possible ; and what is
the inference? Clearly that the imaginative faculty
may select and glorify, but does not create the elements

G

82 ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS

which give to poetry whatever of moral force she
possesses, and that where moral fibre is wanting, it is
not in poetry to supply it.

Matthew Arnold indeed betrays some uneasy con-
sciousness of a truth so obvious that a criticism so
comprehensive as his could not fail to encounter the
proofs of it at a thousand points. Voltaire has said
that *' no nation has treated in poetry moral ideas with
more energy and depth than the English nation."
And our critic begins by telling us, what few will need
to be told, that Voltaire" does not mean by * treating in
poetry moral ideas ' th6 composing moral and didactic
poems." Certainly not; but between this and the
next stage there is perhaps more than one halting-place
which he passes unnoticed. For Voltaire means, it
appears, " the noble and profound application of ideas
to life." Whether Voltaire, among whose deficiencies
we cannot reckon a want of lucidity, would have ac-
cepted this amplification of a meaning, perfectly in*
telligible if his words are taken in their ordinary sense ;
whether this is not one of several instances of a tanta-
lizing trick, practised by Matthew Arnold to perfection,
by which the more nebulous notions of to-day are read
into the clear, if limited, thinking of a previous age, we
shall better see as we proceed :

'* He means the application of these ideas under the con-
ditions fixed for us by the laws of poetic beauty and poetic
truth. If it is said that to call these ideas moral ideas is to
introduce a strong and injurious limitation, I answer that it
is to do nothing of the kind, because moral ideas are really

ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS 83

so main a part of human life. The question, How to live^ is
itself a moral idea, and it is the question which most interests
every man, and with which, in some way or other, he is per-
petually occupied. A large sense is, of course, to be given
to the term moral. Whatever bears upon the question,
* How to live ' comes under it :

* Nor love thy life, nor hate ; but, what thou liv'st
Live well ; how long or short, permit to heaven.'

In those fine lines Milton utters, as every one at once per-
ceives, a moral idea. Yes, but so too, when Keats consoles
the forward-bending lover on the Grecian Urn, the lover
arrested and presented in immortal relief by the sculptor's
hand before he can kiss, with the line :

* For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair — *

he utters a moral idea. When Shakespeare says that —

* We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep, — *

he utters a moral idea."

" Every one perceives " that there is a moral idea in
the third of these quotations scarcely less obvious than
that of the first. But observe how comfortably the
passage in which it is difficult to find any suggestion
which can be reasonably called moral, is " sandwiched "
between the first and third. That line of Keats an
example of the kind of thing Voltaire meant when he
spoke of the English treatment of moral ideas in

84 ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS

poetry ! The notion is almost grotesque. There is
nothing, we may be sure, in the whole of the " Ode on
a Grecian Urn," which he would have called either dis-
tinctively moral or distinctively English. Even if we
use the term moral in the " large sense " which we are
expected to give to it, we are puzzled to discover in
what way the words,

" For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair,"

bear upon the question, " how to live." We are only
conscious that we have been presented with a monster
balloon of theory, and that our morality is expected
to become gaseous in order to inflate it.

We may be thought to have given a disproportionate
treatment to the ethical side of Matthew Arnold's
criticism. Yet we have certainly not given it more
consideration than he would expect for it, and if we
were free to discuss it at much further length, he sup-
plies us with abundant material. His intellectual
convictions and his moral sympathies had made an
armistice which he persuaded himself, and tried to
persuade the world, might be the basis of a lasting
peace. But habits of mind such as his end legiti-
mately in Renan, and only anomalously in Matthew
Arnold. A not unkindly Nemesis made this great
enemy of anomalies and provincialism himself an
anomaly peculiarly insular and English. This son of
religious England could never '* forget his own people
and his father's house," and was quite incapable of
the frank, if regretful, abandonment of earlier pre-

ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS 85

possessions which brought his French contemporary
to the spiritual condition of the Parisian gamin. He
put himself therefore in that middle place " to God and
to His enemies alike displeasing," which to be tenable
required either more faith or less. He never realized
what Renan well knew, that the word " illusion " is a
baneful spell, which, for the soul that has learned to
utter it, reduces the beautiful form and voice of religion
to a gibbering phantom. He never patiently thought
things out in these greatest questions of the present
and future ; and the effect — if it is not the cause —
is that he believed it possible to keep without vital
inconsistency, and the consequent despondency or
cynicism, the head with the Goethes and Heines and
George Sands, and the whole world of modern pagans,
and the heart with the saints. It was a freak of later
Greek sculpture to combine the face of Hermes with
the thews and sinews of Hercules. This bizarre fancy
has more than one parallel among the eccentricities of
modem thought.

Matthew Arnold found no pleasure in the new-
fangled substitutes for religion. Having tasted the old
wine he did not desire the new ; he said (but with the
air of a connoisseur licensed to find fault) *' the old is
better." His fault-finding however must be admitted,
even by those who admire him most, to be occasionally
very random and slipshod work. Here is a palpable
instance :

"*Duty exists,' says Wordsworth, in the 'Excursion';
and then he proceeds thus :

86 ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS

* . . . . Immutably survive,
For our support, the measures and the forms,
Which an abstract Intelligence supplies,
Whose kingdom is, where time and space are not.'

And the Wordsworthian is delighted, and thinks that here is
a sweet union of philosophy and poetry. But the disinter-
ested lover of poetry will feel that the lines carry us really
not a step farther than the proposition which they would
interpret; that they are a tissue of elevated but abstract
verbiage, alien to the very nature of poetry."

We will let " the disinterested lover of poetry " say
what he pleases about these lines in their poetic
character ; nor is this the place to defend them as a
fragment of philosophy. But the news that they add
nothing to our notions of human obligation is too good
to be true ; we should like some other security for this
than our critic's autocratic extravagance of speech.
He has had much to do, in his quality of critic, with
people who found a basis for duty less immutable than
that proposed by Wordsworth ; and these people were
not always to his taste. " What a set ! What a world ! "
he exclaims of the sordid, vapouring, irresponsible
company into which poor Shelley threw himself It is
just the sort of comment which was needed ; in these
days how thankful we ought to be for a critic, and that
one of the greatest of critics, who is capable of these
instincts of repulsion and has the courage to express
them in a word, conscious though we may be that
proximity has something to do with this aversion, and
that the shock which is acute when it comes from

ARNOLD'S LAST ESSAYS 87

quarters so near home, is slight enough from the longi-
tude of Paris or Weimar. But assuredly Matthew
Arnold did not owe to literature, or even " culture,"
his power to resist the glamour with which literature
too often invests questionable morals; and even his
prejudice in favour of" manners, tone, dignity," belongs
to wholesome traditions the place of which genius
itself cannot supply. His last volume contains some
of his most characteristic work, but we hesitate to say,
with his editor, " his best" His best and surest work
in criticism was his earliest ; the very best of all is
perhaps to be found in his verse. But that is often
most interesting which is least faultless ; and these
last essays of his graceful pen, in spite of the many
instances they afford of personal preference/ trying
with but partial success to base itself on principle, will
be welcome to all who have enough freedom of mind
to be fascinated even by the eccentricities of a rarely
gifted spirit.

EDMUND WALLER

THAT Waller revolutionized English poetry is
neither a new nor a true discovery. It was
announced as long s^o as 1690 in a Preface to the
second part of his poems, attributed with every prob-
ability to Atterbury. Here we find it stated that
Waller '* was the first that showed us our tongue had
beauty and numbers in it" Here we read that he
was the first to correct what has, in these latter days,
been called the "overflow" in heroic verse. The
verses of the men before his time, we are told —

" Ran all into one another, and hung together, throughout
a whole copy, like the hooked atoms that compose a body in
Des Cartes. There was no distinction of parts, no regular
stops, nothing for the ear to rest upon ; but as soon as the
copy b^an, down it went like a larum incessantly ; and the
reader was sure to be out of breath before he got to the end
of it ; so. that really verse, in those days, was but downright
prose tagged with rhymes. Mr. Waller removed all these
faults, brought in more polysyllables and smoother measures,
bound up his thoughts better, and in a cadence more
agreeable to the nature of the verse he wrote in ; so that
wherever the natural stops of that were, he contrived the
little breakings of his sense so as to fall in with them."

EDMUND WALLER 89

This is Atterbury, as we conceive of him ; dogmatic
and lucid; but too little painstaking to be exact.
Waller's praise was sung with more discrimination by
Dryden, in 1699. He says indeed that " our numbers
were in their nonage until Waller and Denham
appeared." But in the same valuable document, the
Preface to his Tales, he writes that the " learned and
ingenious Sandys " was —

" The best versifier of the former age : if I may properly
call it by that name, which was the former part of this con-
cluding century. For Spenser and Fairfax both flourished
in the reign of Queen Elizabeth : great masters in our
language : and who saw much farther into the beauties of
our numbers than those who immediately followed them.
Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Waller of
Fairfax ; for we have our lineal descents and clans, as well
as other families. Spenser more than once insinuates that
the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that
he was begotten by him 200 years after his decease. Milton
has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original;
and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller
own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the
Godfrey of BuUoigne, which was turned into English by Mr.
Fairfax."

In 1620, when Waller was but fourteen, " the learned
and ingenious Mr. Sandys " had written lines which, if
we modernize the spelling, we might easily pass off
upon the unwary reader as Pope's heroics. And in
spite of Pope's obligations to the large genius of
Dryden, it is to his early delight in Sandys's translation

90 EDMUND WALLER

/ of the Metamorphoses that he owed that ease and
i harmony of numbers which was his from first to last.
Indeed, though he declared that "he had learnt versi-
fication wholly from Dryden's works," it is certain
that there was in Dryden's form much that he could
not, and more that he would not, imitate. This is a
question which any reader may determine for himself.
The ear which has grown accustomed to the smooth
I heroics, whether of Waller or of Pope, is conscious of a
regime less precise in the structure of Dryden's lines,
i the licence of his rhymes, the frequency of his triplets
' and Alexandrines. In fact, though Pope tells us that

" Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march, and energy divine,"

to be strictly accurate, there was much of this which
Dryden could not teack ; gifts native, individual, in-
communicable, which cannot be formulated, and which
have little to do with the technique and mechanism of
poetry. But if ever any process was inevitable when
once the utility of that form of verse for the treatment
of particular themes was recognized, it was the develop-
ment of the heroic couplet into the shape which we
know, with something more than satiety, as character-
istic of eighteenth-century literature. In attributing so
much to Waller, Atterbury (perhaps even Dryden to
some extent) is influenced by the overwhelming
ascendancy which this measure had already achieved ;
it pervaded literature for him and clouded the past.

EDMUND WALLER 91

In an age the horizon of which had been narrowed by
domestic conflict, an age in which the present was all-
engrossing, it had become the characteristic form of
serious poetry, the weapon of satire ; of religious and
political controversy, in which verse was enlisted, to
an extent hitherto unknown ; it had even for a while
usurped the tragic stage and those remoter topics,
such as Cowley's Davideis, in which the vexed human
spirit sought a refuge from the pressure of realities in
ideal scenes. One great independent soul, dwelling
apart like a star, was above the reach of the prevailing
epidemic. The homage of the Tory High Churchman
Atterbury for the Republican Puritan Milton is in it-
self a charming incongruity ; but it loses none of its
fascination by the manner in which it is displayed.
He commends Milton's phrase "the troublesome
bondage of rhyming " ; he points to Milton's trium-
phant use of freedom ; he hopes for " some excellent
spirit to arise that has leisure enough, and resolution
to break the charm " under which poetry is at present
laid. " But this," he adds, " is a thought for times at
some distance. The present age is a little too war-
like : it may perhaps furnish out matter for a good
poem in the next, but it will hardly encourage one
now. Without prophesying, a man may easily know
what sort of laurels are like to be in request" All
this is excellently said ; and betrays some inkling of
the truth that circumstances, rather than individual
choice, determine the fashions, as well as the persons
that come to the front in literature from time to time.

92 EDMUND WALLER

"The present age is too warlike"; the experiment
required peace, leisure, security ; a mind not absorbed
in the things of the hour. It is clear that, though he
mentions with praise the meagre and inefficient efforts
of Roscommon in blank verse, he has here in mind its
fitness for some far larger achievement. Yet how
strangely this comes after a regret that Waller never
adopted it! Rhyme, Atterbury says, must, whether
it will or no, take its place among the things which
Cicero called Upida et concintuiy which cito satietate
afficiunt aurium sensum fastidiosissimum :

" This Mr. Waller understood very well ; and, therefore,
to take off the danger of a surfeit that way, strove to please
by variety and new sounds. Had he carried this observation,
among others, as far as it would go, it must, methinks, have
shown him the incurable fault of this jingling kind of poetry,
and have led his later judgment to blank verse ; but he
continued an obstinate lover of rhyme to the very last ; it
was a mistress that never appeared unhandsome in his eyes,
and was courted by him long after Sacharissa had been for-
saken."

Why did it not occur to Atterbury, when he was
saying this so prettily, that it was just because Waller's
province was the lepida et condnna that rhyme was
his fittest instrument ? A Waller without rhyme is as
inconceivable as a " Paradise Lost " with it. His most
serious thoughts are shaped in pretty fancies, seldom
without a touch of epigram. He carefully nursed his
somewhat slender stock of these. But whether he
writes in his earlier days to his Amoret —

EDMUND WALLER 93

*' And as pale sickness does invade
Your frailer part, the breaches made
In that fair lodging, will more clear
Make the bright guest, your soul, appear " —

or whether, in old age, without a compliment, and with
more of the sad earnestness of a truth felt as well as
seen, he pens with trembling hand the words which
we all know :

^ The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light, through chinks that time has made '' —

it is surely impossible not to acknowledge that thus
and no otherwise could the thing have been said,
considering the thought itself, the times, and the
man.

The assumed archaism of Spenser and Fairfax, like
the real archaism of Chaucer, obscured in the seven-
teenth century the truth that more had been achieved
already in the way of melodious verse, than that or
the succeeding century could hope to rival. In Dry-
den's " Preface," Waller is the poetical son of Fairfax,
and cotild we but disabuse our minds of the notion
that the history of methodized verse is the history of
the heroic couplet, this pedigfree would at once dispose
of the view which makes Waller, whose mind was
carried, with movements as smooth and facile as his
verse, along the stream of circumstance, the author of
a sort of poetical coup (Titat. It is known now that to
all intents and purposes the heroic couplet had been
brought to a high degree of perfection by Chaucer
about 250 years before Waller had written a line ; it

11

94 EDMUND WALLER

is one of Dryden's venial errors that he did not
acknowledge this, although he admitted that "they
who lived with Chaucer, and some time after him,
thought him musical," and that "he who published
the last edition of him would make lis believe the
fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten
syllables in a verse where we find but nine." This
was, in fact, a weapon once bright and keen, which
had grown rusty in the poetical armoury for want of
frequent use. The great masters of harmony among
the Elizabethans had neglected it ; having, we believe,
a truer insight into its limitations than most of their
successors. The truth is that without the enjambe-
ment or " overflow " rhymed heroics are a bondage ;
and with it they are to many readers now the least
pleasant to the ear of all the well-known forms of
verse. Surely though we may read with some sym-
pathy the protest of Keats against what he calls —

" A schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,''

and the folk who—

" Swayed about upon a rocking-horse,
And thought it Pegasus,"

we may regret that to make his attack upon these
cavaliers he should have chosen to mount a steed of
the same description, only with the rockers out of
joint Bulwer Lytton's onslaught on contemporary
verse was perhaps tinged with old-fashioned prejudice,
but the parody in " Kenelm Chillingly " scarcely

EDMUND WALLER 95

exaggerates the distressing effect of this particular
form of the modem reaction. On the rare occasion on |
which Shakespeare seriously and continuously employs '
the heroic couplet he perhaps instinctively limits the *
overflow, which it was impossible, in view of effective
dramatic expression, altogether to avoid. Anyone
may test this by comparing the rhymed with the un-
rhymed portions of "Midsummer Night's'Dream"; and
in the soliloquy of Friar Laurence, at the beginning
of the third scene of the second act of " Romeo and
Juliet," there is not an instance of enjambement in the
whole space of thirty lines. These lines, taken sepa-
rately, are neither more nor less harmonious than
those of the sonnets, or of the prologue to the same
act, with which they may easily be compared, nor are
the rhymes much better or much worse ; and therefore
if their combined effect is less pleasing, we are led to
find the reason of this discrepancy in the fabric of the
verse itself, which calls for a greater sacrifice of the
pregnant sense than the poet was willing to make.
Each line of the heroic couplet ends with a challenge, I
so speedily taken up that we cannot help noticing
when the challenge is inadequately met. Thtls in —

*' Many for many virtues excellent

None but for some and yet all different "—

we have a rhyme certainly not more defective than
this from the sonnets :

" Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,
Drink up the monarch's plague, Hcixs flattery^

96 EDMUND WALLER

Or whether shall I say, mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy f "

And yet it is probable that most ears will be more
keenly conscious of defect in the first than in the second
instance. But our illustration has a farther bearing.
When Atterbury says, " Mr. Waller brought in more
polysyllables," he means in the body, not the ex-
tremity of the line ; the whole tendency of the im-
provement, real or supposed, in this kind is to limit
the use of polysyllables in rhyme, and above all to
banish their concurrence. Here we have a second
enervating influence. A kind of verse thus doubly
restricted, if an impediment to the natural utterance
of thought, is fatal to the effective utterance of passion.
This is in part the account of the brief and long-
forgotten reign of rhymed verse upon the English
stage, as compared with its continuous ascendancy in
the French tragic drama, amid all vicissitudes of taste
and schools, from Comeille to Victor Hugo. We.
open Comeille at random, and find abundance of
couplets like this :

" Reste du sang ingrat d'un ^poux infidkle
H^ritier d'une flamme envers moi criminelle?^

As we find also abundance like this :

" Otez-moi done de doute
£t montrez-moi la main quil faut que je redouteJ^

We have here something more than the licence^ of
Chaucer and Shakespeare combined; and assuredly

^ A friend has inferred from this that I suppose such rhymes
to be a licence in French; that was not at all my meaning.

EDMUND WALLER ' 97

no great " bondage " to the poet. But the favourite
line of the days of Dryden and of Pope was a
" bondage " ; at once the effect and the cause of a
narrow range of thought. Pope tells us, with admir-
able satire, of the men who —

" Ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes ;
Where'er you find * the cooling western breeze '
In the next line, it ' whispers through the trees ;'
If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep '
The reader's threatened (not in vain) with * sleep.' "

He little suspected that the time was to come when he
himself would be charged with making poetry " a mere
mechanic art." And surely it is not by the novelty of
his rhymes that he delivers us from the sense of the
inevitable and the recurrent ; his subtle genius does
not escape these trammels, but only wears them with
a difference. Dryden, as we think, is not in the direct
line of this insensible servitude ; the " two coursers "
which Gray bestows upon him are a little restive; and
sometimes give a stimulating shock to his " car." On
other grounds than this it is impossible to class Dryden,
and his wide sympathies and affinities, with the pre-
cision which some modern criticism affects. To talk
of " the school of Dryden and Pope " is above all mis-
leading. He who wrote the " Annus Mirabilis " and
the verses on Anne Killigrew grasps Cowley with his
left hand and Milton with his right He sometimes
passes without hesitation from the province of pure
poetry or the truth of nature to that large domain of

H

98 EDMUND WALLER

" wit," as our ancestors called it, which tempted irre-
sistibly so many ingenious minds. But this temptation
is limited to no age and no school. The much-abused
terms of " classical " and " romantic," in whatever sense
we may employ them, are here an unprofitable dis-
tinction. Is Spenser a romantic poet ? Addison (but
who now reads Addison ?) tells us that, like Milton,
Spenser has a genius much above that sort of ingenuity
which pushes to extravagance the metaphoric use of
words. Is Waller a classic poet ? Addison again
tells us that Mr. Waller — as Ovid also among the Latin
writers — has a gfreat deal of it. And the truth is that
there is in almost all literature this tendency towards
" conceits," and their fitness must be judged of by a
sense at once finer and healthier than a formal criticism
can bestow. We may agree with Dryden that Ovid's
Dido to JEnesLS is a poor rival to the fourth iEneid ;
without denying that ingenuity has here some charm.
And it is not criticism, but the experience of life that
must tell us at last whether sad or sick men play
nicely with their names like Ajax or John of Gaunt,
and whether we hear truth to nature or fanciful ex-
travagance when Laertes says —

'* Too much of water has thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears."

And, again, what can Pope himself reply, or we reply
for Pope, to surly Dennis, when he objects that in the
encounter between the ladies and the beaux in the
" Rape of the Lock," " We have a real combat and a

EDMUND WALLER 99

metaphorical dying " ? The charge is true : this is an
egregious example of metaphor displacing truth, and
that after a very dramatic and objective fashion :
Addison, nay the " Essay on Criticism " itself, is here
set at naught. Dennis is right ; but the world is
pleased ; for Pope is never tedious and does not go
beyond the licence which the reader is willing to con-
cede him. And has there ever been a time, since our
literature was in any sense vital, when there was not
the critical sense, generically the same which Pope and
Addison exhibit in a highly developed form, insisting,
as they insisted, on sobriety and restraint ? Chaucer's
" Host of the Tabard " sums up, in very trenchant
fashion, the corrective function of criticism when he
interrupts " The Rime of Sir Thopas " with

" No more of this for Goddes dignitee."

The same literature supplies the bane and the anti-
dote. The Elizabethan euphuism encounters its satirist
in Shakespeare, its critic in Gabriel Harvey, its counter-
foil (as well as censor^) in Sir Philip Sidney. Later on
we find Ben Jonson uttering a timely warning against
a new form of extravagance when he advises that " it
is fit to read the best authors to youth first, and those
the openest and clearest, as Sidney before Donne."
And if that " Son of Ben Jonson," George Morley, the
future Bishop of Winchester, gave, as we are told,
counsels in literature to Waller, we have another
evidence that the spiritual succession of good sense was

^ See " Apologie for Poesie," p. 68, Arber's reprint.

100 EDMUND WALLER

never interrupted, in spite of a transient fashion. Let
us concede, though it is a large concession, that in
Waller what our forefathers called " wit " predominated
over poetry. His merit is that he knew how to manage
this faculty ; that he did not, like Cowley, play with
figures and semblances, until the thing to be signified
was almost lost from sight. To him belongs that
chastened sort of fancy, of which we have the perfect
flower in the " Rape of the Lock." It is unlikely per-
haps that Pope could ever have seen the pretty lines
" Upon a Lady's Fishing with an Angle," which we
thank Mr. Thorn Drury for printing for the first time ;
but when we read —

" Eack golden hair's a fishing line,
Able to catch such hearts as mine,"

who can help thinking of the ever-memorable couplets :

" With hairy springes we the birds betray,
Slight lines of hair surprise the finny prey,
Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare
And beauty draws us with a single hair '' ?

But here is another parallel, of quite a different genus
which can hardly be accidental. Gray had certainly
read the lines :

" Great Julius, on the mountain bred,

A flock perhaps, or herd, had led,

He that the world subdued had been

But the best wrestler on the green.

^Tis art and knowledge which draw forth

The hidden seeds of native worth ;

They blow those sparks, and make them rise

Into such flames as touch the skies.''

EDMUND WALLER loi

His Hampden, and Cromwell,^ and Milton, like
Waller's Caesar, perish in obscurity through lack of
the "ample page" of knowledge. The thought is
exactly the same, but how different the context in
which it occurs ! Zelinda, " that fairest piece of well-
formed earth," whose resolve to wed "none but a
prince" is the theme on which Waller blends this
serious thought with the praise of her eyes, was prob-
ably never anything but the "shadow of a shade" ; this
is not the setting in which we expect to find those
touches which make us realize the pathos of human life.
The poets of this generation were too often like the
voyagers in Browning's " Paracelsus," who set up their
splendid shrines and statues upon a bleak and desolate
rock. Waller's powers would certainly be in higher re-
pute, but for the trivial or transitory interests to which
he gave them. The court poet pays dearly for his
courtliness at last. He bestows the best of his experi-
ence upon perishable or unprofitable matter, and we
are surprised rather than pleased to find not the fly
in amber, but amber in the fly. It was a theory of
Waller's, fathered no doubt by his circumstances and
his consequent practice, that the poet's sphere was one
in which real emotion had no place. " He wrote," he
tells us, " with high conceit " when he was free, but —

" Who will describe a storm must not be there.
Passion writes well, neither in love nor fear."

^ From the Mason MS. of the "Elegy" we find that Gray
originally wrote " Caesar " for " Cromwell," as he wrote " Cato"
and "Tully"for "Hampden" and "Milton."

!
I

102 EDMUND WALLER

His famous answer to Charles II., " Poets, sir, succeed
better in fiction than in truth," was not, we see, alto-
gether an impromptu. We may smile at Johnson's
scorn of Waller's frivolous topics ; we may attribute it
to the fact that he was, above all, a moralist ; but his
censure marks also the clearer conviction of a genera-
tion for whom the age of patronage had happily passed
away, that poetry if it is to last long must be deeply
rooted in real feeling ; must have, if not serious, at
least adequate aims.

Want of sincere feeling is the secret of Waller's
principal defect, the discrepancy between the separate
parts of each poem, so that very few of them form a
perfect whole, and those such as " Go, lovely Rose," or
the verses " On a Girdle," among the shortest. For
sincerity, though by no means a guarantee for a sus-
tained level of achievement, is at least a great stimulus
in this direction. Cowley's perverse ingenuity is most
conspicuous where he has set himself, with no real
passion, to write his " Mistress " as a fashionable task ;
and he gets rid of almost all his extravagance in his
" Elegy on the Death of William Hervey," and of
much of it in those original verses, the fruit of genuine
experience, which he inserts in his Essays. Analog-
ously, we believe that if Waller's themes had been
chosen by him with more spontaneity, and in a more
independent spirit, we should find fewer instances in
his pages of incongruity and bathos. As it is, some of
his best lines have all the appearance of "ideas for
verses " kept in reserve for any " copy " to which they

EDMUND WALLER 103

might be made to fit We have quoted, in our first
example of Waller's manner, the most serious thought
of his life, both in its earliest and in its latest form.
But in that earliest form it is linked with a trumpery
pagan simile so utterly out of keeping that it is a sin
even to quote it in such a connection. Poets who
work after a different fashion suffer when we pluck
choice passages from the context, and serve them up
as elegant extracts ; in Waller's case, this is often the
best service we can render his fame. For instance,
take these lines " On the Picture of a Fair Youth after
he was Dead " :

" As gathered flowers, while their wounds are new.

Look gay and fresh, as on the stalk they grew :

Tom from the root that nourished them, awhile

(Not taking notice of their fate) they smile.

And in the hand which rudely plucked them, show

Fairer than those that to their autumn grow ;

So love and beauty still that visage grace ;

Death cannot fright them from their wonted place.

Alive the hand of cruel Age had marred

Those lovely features, which cold Death has spared."

This is very beautiful ; but we have stopped in time,
just before Waller tells us that it was no wonder
that the young man " sped in love so well " when he
had breath to tell "his high passion," and no other
business than " to persuade that dame " whose mutual
love advanced him so high that heaven was but the
next step. And the truth is that we have but quoted
one of Waller's cherished images ; he has used it, with
but a slight variation adapted to the circumstances, in

104 EDMUND WALLER

his address, A la Mcdade^ the lovely Amoret, whom
heaven " solicits," he says —

" With such a care
As roses from their stalks we tear,
When we would still preserve them new
And fresh, as on the bush they grew."

Again, Waller never wrote prettier verses than the
opening lines in the poem " Of the Queen " :

" The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build

Her humble nest, lies silent in the field ;

But if the promise of a cloudless day,

Aurora smiling, bids her rise and play.

Then straight she shows 'twas not for want of voice,

Or power to climb, she made so low a choice ;

Singing she mounts; her airy wings are stretched

Towards heaven, as if from heaven her note she fetched."

But if we would remain pleased we must not read
much farther. We are in the descending scale. Her
Majesty's admirers are weaned from all meaner affec-
tions ; they are like a traveller who has mistaken the
glow-worm for a diamond, and " casts the worthless
worm away " when better informed by the sunshine ;
royalty, hitherto in the character of Aurora, next be-
comes a surgeon :

" She saves the lover, as we gangrenes stay,
, By cutting hope, like a lopped limb away.
This makes her bleeding patients to accuse
High Heaven"—

and the reader to accuse something else. We have
attributed to Waller a certain measure of that good

EDMUND WALLER 105

sense which is indispensable to any poetry which is to
be read from generation to generation ; but these
instances are enough to show us how partial in him
the triumph of good sense was ; once started on a
simile, he knows, better than most of his contem-
poraries, when to stop ; he is scarcely better in-
structed than the poets of the so-called metaphysical
school when not to begin. He makes no endeavour
after that uniformity of tone, which in all great poets
is an instinct, and in many minor poets a conscious
aim. That maxim, " Survey the whole," which Pope
pleads in arrest of judgment on particular blemishes,
is equally valid as a preventive ; we recognize better
what was the really solid service rendered to our
literature by that epoch which he and Addison in-
terpret for us, when we see poems so finished and
graceful in some respects as Waller's subject to such
collapses of structure. Waller knew the word'^ bathos"
and its meaning ; he knew the opening lines of the
" Ars Poetica," and all about the ^^purpureus pannusi^
yet often enough in a set of his verses the ^^ purpureus
pannus " is the one noteworthy thing. What is more,
to Dryden also and to Atterbury the " Ars Poetica "
was a kind of Decalogue; yet they do but praise
Waller for his choice of words and ease of numbers,
and betray (so far as we are aware) no suspicion of
the radical defect which we have noted. Atterbury is
content to look back upon the reign of Charles IL as
the Augustan age of English; and Waller himself, with
his characteristic economy of thought, and not, we may

io6 EDMUND WALLER

be sure, without some notion of his own contribution
to the desired result, twice tells us that —

** Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste,
Polished like marble, would like marble last''

The words of Persius :

** Quis populi sermo est ? Quis enim ? nisi carmina molli
Nunc demum numero fluere, ut per leve severos
Efiundat iunctura ungues " —

exactly express the measure of success which Waller
aimed at achieving and his admirers thought he had
achieved, neither the artist nor his judges supposing
that much remained to do, and that something more
is necessary for sculpture than the material and the
polish.

The office of the professional mourner or panegyrist
lends itself too readily to bathos, which is often only
the transition from utterances which, however applied,
were once conceived in real feeling, to taskwork exe-
cuted in a more frigid mood. Waller had a genuine
sense of beauty, and especially of Nature's loveliness
in little things ; in this respect he has something of
Herrick's bias ; something also, in treating such objects,
of Herrick's skill. But he very often makes us think
of a miniature-painter who has set to work upon too
large a canvas, and displaying only on a part of it his
special aptitude, fills in the rest with some coarser and
cheaper kind of dexterity, which he has also at com-
mand. Waller has touches of real tenderness — at least,
so they impress us. When creatures young and

EDMUND WALLER 107

beautiful perish, or are ready to perish, he seems
possessed with genuine pity for their fate ; a nature
essentially kindly, combined assuredly with experience,
to write for " the tomb of the only son of the Lord
Andover " the lines :

'^ Like buds appearing ere the frosts are passed,
To become man he made such fatal haste.
And to perfection laboured so to climb.
Preventing slow experience and time,
That 'tis no wonder Death our hopes beguiled,
He's seldom old that will not be a child."

We should be sorry to think that here he is advantaged
by that " fiction " which he professed to think neces-
sary to poetic success. Here as elsewhere Waller's
thought is epigrammatic ; but epigram does not ex-
clude pathos. Perhaps fancy was never more touch-
ingly employed than in those lines of Martial on the
youthful charioteer, whose thread, he says, Lachesis
cut, because, counting his palms of victory, she mis-
took him for an old man. Such a thought would have
been welcomed by Waller, who deplores in very
kindred strains —

" The learned Savile's hei^*,
So early wise, and lasting fair,
That none except her years they told
Thought her a child, or thought her old."

The present generation, with its rather Pharisaic
discourse about " high seriousness " in the matter of
poetry, needs to be reminded that wit, in its old-
fashioned sense, had once a larger province than we

io8 EDMUND WALLER

are disposed to give it ; that it could be graceful in
tears as in laughter ; and bore its part in interpreting
the severer aspects of man's destiny. In one of those
pleasant oases with which Porson skilfully relieved
the monotony of textual criticism he reminds us that
the figure of the eagle slain by an arrow winged with
his own feathers (with which Waller, after his manner
addresses a lady " singing a song of his composing ")
was anticipated by the sombre muse of iEschylus.
We will not then blame Waller for devoting his
characteristic gift to elegy ; nor would this use of it
even seem false in tone, but that it is employed on the
same occasion to pay an incongruous tribute to the
living. He is at his best and at his worst in com-
pliment ; at his best because no one can turn a com-
pliment more gracefully; at his worst because he
never knows when a compliment is out of place alto-
gether. We are dangerously near to the disgust which
on certain themes pretty make-believes always inspire,
when, addressing " the Lord Admiral, on his late sick-
ness and recovery," he says of the brother and sister
of the convalescent that —

" As lilies overcharged with rain, they bend

Their beauteous heads, and with high heaven contend,

Fold thee within their snowy arms^ and cry —

* He is too faultless, and too young, to die ! ' "

Let us repeat that bathos was at this time an
epidemic for which the preventive, if known, was
neglected. This will help us to understand why
Waller, who can write of the Lady Rich —

EDMUND WALLER 109

" Some happy angel, that beholds her there,
Instruct us to record what she was here ! "—

can also write in the same context —

" That horrid word, at once like lightning spread,
Struck all our ears — The Lady Rich is dead ! "

From this to the couplet from an unsuccessful prize
poem on the " Recovery of the Prince of Wales " —

" Hour after hour the electric message came,
* He is not better ; but is much the same ' " —

is surely but a step. Pope has a great tenderness for
Waller, yet he cannot help including in "Martinus
Scriblerus on the Bathos " the example —

" Under the tropics is our language spoke
And part of Flanders has received our yoke."

But a less friendly critic might have cited many
another instance. In the absence of critical warnings,
there was one pitfall, into which Dryden, as well as
Waller, sometimes tumbles, in the custom of treating
contemporary events historically in verse. In the
Duke of York's sea-fight with Opdam, the Earl of
Falmouth, Lord Muskerry, and Mr. Boyle were killed
at the Duke's side by a volley ; this was a fact too
important to be omitted, and so Waller writes —

" Three worthy persons from his side it tore.
And dyed his garment with their scattered gore."

Much as, according to Macaulay, one of the many
poetasters on the Battle of Blenheim invites us to —

no EDMUND WALLER

^^ Think of two thousand gentlemen at least,
And each man mounted on his capering beast ;
Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals."

Even Addison's " Campaign " is by no means free
from this blemish, though, if we would judge of this,
we must read not the instances given with apologetic
malice in Pope's " Martinus Scriblerus," but the speci-
men over which Dick Steele, with a tenderness in-
spired by wine and friendship, hiccups in a certain
chapter of " Esmond."

When Aubrey tells us of those courtiers who made
Waller tipsy at Somerset House so that " at the water-
stayres he fell downe, and had a cruel fall," he adds
that, "'Twas pitty to use such a sweet swan so in-
humanely." Something of the same compunction ought
to be felt by the critic when he anatomizes in cold
blood this sweet swan's cygnets. When much has
been said about him in the seventeenth century and
something in the nineteenth which savours of exaggera-
tion, it is useful to try to fix his real place and merit.
We have seen that we must not attribute to him a
great importance in the history of English metre ;
even in the heroic couplet which he undoubtedly
helped to popularize, he did not, as Johnson remarks,
dispense with expletives ; and in such lines as

"^/ once they promise what at once they give,"

and

" Resolved to conquer, or resolved to die,"

we have feeble efforts after that antithetic manner in
which a later generation achieved a not very valuable

EDMUND WALLER in

success. It is far more serviceable to realize what he
was in the substance of his verse and the character of
his thoughts. We cannot difference him from his
contemporaries in the terms of any school. Like the
metaphysical poets he abounds in hyperbole, conceits,
far-fetched resemblances ; his distinctive mark is that
in the use of these he is more dexterous, more finished,
restrained, concise. You cannot go much further than
to say, that only while the hand of sleep closes the
eyes of royalty can the sun boast itself " the brightest
thing that shines " ; but having uttered his daring
paradox Waller is contented to have done with it.
To connect Westminster Abbey with the summit of a
volcano was a hazardous experiment such as Cowley
would have delighted to make. Waller has made it ;
the House of Parliament where "all our ills were
shaped" stood hard by; yet the temple was un-
harmed :

" So snow on ^Etna does unmelted lie,

Whence rolling flames and scattered cinders fly;

The distant country in the ruin shares ;

What falls from heaven the burning mountain spares."

There is a certain art here employed to disguise
from us the remoteness of the analogy ; we feel that
at the same date almost any other of our minor poets,
if the same fancy struck him, would have laboured to
excite our wonder how any mortal man could have
thought of such a resemblance at all. Again, Waller
is an accomplished man ; an Etonian and a King's
man, he is an elegant Latin verse-writer, though when

112 EDMUND WALLER

we remember that in his rendering of one of his own
English poems, skilful as it is, he makes the substan-
tive "laurea" a neuter plural, we cannot call him
exact; and, like the metaphysical poets, he makes
gfreat use of whatever learning he possesses for the
purpose of his song. In particular he deals, like them,
with notions of science ; but with a truer, because a
more sober, ingenuity than theirs. The accident that
he knew less than they combines with a better instinc-
tive taste than theirs to make him give us such lines
as these " To the Mutable Fair " :

" The formal stars do travel so

As we their names and courses know.

And he that on their changes looks

Would think them governed by our books ;

But never were the clouds reduced

To any art; the motions used

By those free vapours are so light,

So frequent, that the conquered sight

Despairs to find the rules that guide

Those gilded shadows as they slide."

And though Johnson affirms that he is there " too
much of a Copemican," what strikes us yet more is
the finished adroitness, with which in praise of " De
Momay's eyes " he tells the sun —

" Well does this prove

The error of those antique books.

Which made you move

About the world ; her charming looks

Would fix your beams, and make it ever day,

Did not the rolling earth snatch her away.''

EDMUND WALLER 113

In fact there is an air of simplicity about Waller's
boldest strokes ; he delivers them as if they were the
most natural things in the world. He is, perhaps, as
ambitious as any other of his day to display whatever
erudition he possesses ; happy therefore in his com-
parative ignorance ; for learning in his time encum-
bered the wings of poetry ; and there was only one
song-bird, and that song-bird Milton, whom it helped
to fly.

There is one praise of Waller which no critic should
omit, for, considering the nature of so many of his
themes and the age in which he wrote, it is specially
honourable to him, and throws the best and latest
aspect of his character into high relief. If in the
volume before us we have all that he ever wrote it
must be acknowledged that, though often trivial, he is i
singularly free from vicious suggestions, and that in ^.
the old man's regrets for his wasted powers we are to
read nothing more than a wish that he had given them
to those religious meditations which are the subject of
his last poems, and of his longest, that " Of the Divine
Love." His literary reputation has suffered from
association with less respectable names, from certain
strange and almost inexplicable episodes in his political
career, and from the impression, thence in part derived,
that he was a njan of defective moral sense. In the
reaction towards a purer tone in letters which Steele
and Addison helped to bring about, his fame as a
writer suffered from that injustice which, according to
Macaulay, the British public, in its periodic fits of

I

114 EDMUND WALLER

morality, always inflicts; and the innocent "Verses
on a Girdle " were actually selected for censure. The
history of the plot which goes by his name shows that
he proved weak and ignoble under the fear of death ;
that he was dissolute when he was for a while a
widower has been affirmed of him, and is possibly
true ; but he was an affectionate husband and father,
and there is evidence that in his latter years the man
was much respected and even beloved. If in turning
his mercurial pages we do not expect to find any
sense of the seriousness of life, let it be to his credit
that it is there; that even there "are tears for sad
events and the estate of mortal men touches the soul."
A transcript of the lines entitled " Of the last Verses
in the Book" is headed "The last verses my dear
ffather made," and let this little domestic tribute be
for us as a volume of forgotten praise in a region to
which history and criticism have no access, while we
copy, for their unmistakable note of sincerity, the
words to which Waller's title refers ; —

"Wrestling with death, these lines I did indite:
No other theme could give my soul delight
O that my youth had thus employed my pen I
Or that I now could write as I wrote then !
But 'tis of grace, if sickness, age, and pain
Are felt as throes, when we are bom again ;
Timely they come to wean us from this earth,
As pangs that wait upon a second birth."

JOHN GAY

IF Gay were living now, what, considering his
powers and the character of his gift, would be his
place among men of letters ? We have some data for
a comparison, at least in one department; for that
light and airy creation, the English comic opera, of
which he gave the earliest example, is once more
in fashion. The immortality of the di minorum
gentium of literature is often less the result of genius
than of a fortunate choice of theme. In this respect
Gay has been more than usually happy. He is the
prototype of a class of writers still in vogue ; he is the
describer also of scenes and manners and customs
which still have no remote interest for all English-
men. Again, like La Fontaine and (if we may be
pardoned an association so incongruous in other
respects) Dr. Watts, Gay has conquered by stooping ;
and the author of " The Hare with Many Friends "
lives with the historian of " Le Lion et le Moucheron "
and the panegyrist of the little " Busy Bee."

The present age would perhaps rank Gay lowest
in that kind of writing in which, in his own time,
he achieved a phenomenal success. The " Beggar's

to—

Or—

ii6 JOHN GAY

Opera" is very coarse homespun compared with the

dainty fabrics which have come from the loom of

Mr. W. S. Gilbert. Both artists have the merit of

a naive simplicity ; but we are on a lower plane of wit

and humour altogether when we pass from the delicate

satire of

" When everybody's somebody
Nobod/s anybody " —

" Since laws were made for every degree
To curb vice in others, as well as in me,
I wonder we ha'nt better company
Upon Tyburn tree."

" How happy could I be with either,

Were t'other dear charmer away ;
But while you thus tease me together.

To neither a word will I say
But tol de rol," etc.

These strains, so captivating to Dukes and
Duchesses in 1728, are better suited, for a continuance,
to the taste of Tony Lumpkin's friends, or of the
lustige Gesellen in Auerbach's cellar. Of the "Splendid
Shilling " of John Philips Johnson has said, with much
truth, that " the merit of such performances begins and
ends with the first author." He might have said the
same of the "Beggar's Opera" considered as an
attempt to set Newgate on Parnassus.

Yet in one respect the songs of the "Beggar's
Opera," of " Polly," and of the " What-d'ye Call It ? "
have a certain interest for the critic. They are an
early symptom of a desire for a little more ease in

JOHN GAY 117

eighteenth-century verse. Not by any means a serious
reaction ; the stately heroics or Alexandrines were no
more to be discarded than wigs and shoe-buckles.
The lyrist himself sometimes seems tickled with a
sense of his own absurdity ; and we think of a company
of highly dressed personages enjoying a game of Puss-
in-the-Comer, or Blind Man's Buff. The story of
Cowper (to Unwin, August 4, 1783), on the joint
authorship of the ballad in the " What-d'ye Call It ? "
is questioned by Mr. Underbill, although Cowper
professes to speak on good authority. It is not
difficult of credit, and it is quite in keeping with the
vein in which the thing, as we suppose, was done,
that " the most celebrated association of clever fellows
this country ever saw — Swift, Arbuthnot, Pope, and
Gay — ^united their strength and abilities in the com-
position of a song." Only, when Cowper adds that
they "did not think it beneath them," he perhaps
gives the business too serious a nuance for the humour
in which we conceive it to* have been undertaken.
" Let us. lend friend Gay a hand," we can fancy these
greater gods saying, bursting in upon the little fat
poet who is racking his brains in that most painful of
all tasks, the quest of things sprightly or naive.
Arbuthnot, the satirist with little acrimony, and Swift,
the satirist with much, were both, we may be sure,
letting their wits take a holiday on this occasion.
Pope too, the youngest and the most malicious
member of this strange confederacy, must certainly
have enjoyed this opportunity of indirectly mocking

i

ii8 JOHN GAY

the pastoral simplicity of Ambrose Philips once more.
Is it possible to conceive such ^ junto capping verses
over a love-sick maiden without banter ? We rather
picture them rolling in their chairs to the sing-song
measure as each contributes his couplet or quatrain :

" The merchant robb'd of pleasure

Sees tempests in despair ;
But whaf s the loss of treasure

To the losing of my dear ?
Should you some coast be laid on

Where gold and diamonds grow,
You'll find a richer maiden,

But none that loves you so."

Gay alone here was pursuing something like his
proper trade ; but for the rest, ^they had a hand in it,
it was with the unextinguishable laughter proper to
such an Olympus.

We a little incline to believe Cowper's tradition,
because this particular ballad has a quite extraordinary-
character of simplicity, which, successful as it is, savours
of a jest. It may, of course, be altogether by the same
hand that wrote " Sweet William's Farewell to Black-
eyed Susan." The first half of the century, as Cowper
says, was rich in kindred productions, a fact quite
compatible with the other fact, that they were not
undertaken with much " high seriousness." The poet
" buckled to " his epic, which men have forgotten, but
he " threw off" his ballad, which they remember. Who
now knows anything of Glover's Leonidas ? But, at
least for historians and note-makers, "Hosier's Ghost"

JOHN GAY 119

still walks. So does " Mai^aret's Ghost," whom Mallet
raised s^in ; and she takes her revenge now upon the
faithless sex by betraying schoolboys into false quan*
tities in their attempts to translate her into Latin
el^acs. Mallet's " Amyntor and Theodora," to whom
he gave epic dignity and so many blank verses, are
the real ghosts now ; the merest shadow of a shade.
Tickell's monody on the death of Addison is praised,
but, with the exception of two lines, scarcely re-
membered ; but his " Lucy and Colin " may continue
for some time yet to draw tears, perhaps not very
sentimental, in the classroom. Cowper, with a judg-
ment pleasantly coloured by affection, affirms that
Vincent Bourne's renderings of these ballads of Tickell
and Gay and Mallet are more beautiful than the
originals, and surpass all that Ovid and TibuUus have
left behind them. Discounting as much as we please
from this opinion, we shall always have the residuum
that these things are translatable because they deal
with the emotions which are always with us, on the
safe plane of common — that is to say, universal, sense.
Let us not forget that Addison, with that insight
into first principles which is the critic's "harvest of
the quiet eye," had, as early as 171 1, in two papers
upon "Chevy Chase," noted that the secret of the
vitality and power of the songs of the people lies in
their truth to the permanent elements of human nature.
He exhumes Sidney's acknowledgment that the old
song of Percy and Douglas, though sung but " by some
blind crowder," " moved his heart more than with a

I20 JOHN GAY

trumpet " ; and he dissents from Sidney's judgment
on " the rude style and evil apparel " of the song, etc.^
Sidney is here, perhaps, hampered by those academic
prejudices which expect literature to be ornate. His
own practice was not extravagant ; but the euphuism
of his generation and its various developments were
bound to end in the conceits of the metaphysical poets
and a fashion of self-conscious, ambitious, elaborate
effort. Addison's retrospect is upon a literature which,
sharing as he did the dominant taste in architecture,
he calls, by way of disparagement, Gothic ; and he
sets himself, in defiance of ridicule, to prove an epic
dignity, the majestic simplicity of a Parthenon, in
" Chevy Chase." But it may be doubted whether the
result of these endeavours to recommend " nature "
was at all commensurate with their courage. The
simplicity of the ballad was a relief, but it was not
business ; there was, perhaps, throughout the eighteenth
century a feeling, latent rather than expressed, that
anything great and serious must be announced with a
certain pomp of manner. We see traces of this in
Johnson's " Lives of the Poets." What is written
with directness and without obvious pains, especially
if it lacks a definite moral, he is disposed to slur ; he
thinks of all such verses what he says of Swift's, that
" they offer little upon which the critic can exercise

> Addison did not know, what Percy made clear, that the
ballad, in the form in which he knew it, was a later version.
The " Chevy Chase " which Sidney had heard is the first of the
« Reliques."

JOHN GAY 121

his powers." Indeed, after the publication of the
** Reliques " he had sniffed the coming breeze, and
snorted with a derision which found vent extempore in
parody —

*' As with my hat upon my head

I walked into the Strand,

I there did meet another man

With his hat in his hand." *

Yet undoubtedly, as far as Gay survives, he owes
his vitality in part to the modesty of aim, the apparent
directness, pleasing still, because not spoiled by
obsolete affectations, which is found in some of his
songs, and which helps to make so much of ballad
poetry immortal. In his heroics Gay is unsuccessful
just as far as he is ambitious. Whatever pleasure these
gave to his own generation was the pleasure men find
in seeing trivial things (the word is oddly in place
here) versified. The lady who, as he tells us, advised
him —

" No more let trifling themes your muse employ
Nor lavish verse to paint a female toy,"

was no wise monitress. The "female toy" is the
" Fan," and Gay's " Fan," if not a success, enables us
at least to fix the limits of his imaginative powers.
It scarcely conveys the right impression to say, with
Mr. Austin Dobson, that it is " unreadable" ; it is 'the

^ On another occasion, when he thought he could beat
Percy's version of " JGo verde," etc., he betrays his epoch com-
pletely — " Confused in mutual slaughter ^^ is part of his ren-
dering.

123 JOHN GAY

second and third books that betray the inexhaustible
spinner of conventional verse. The first should have
an interest for us, because in it (perhaps even in the
others to some extent) are resemblances to the" Rape
of the Lock," and it seems at first sight to the credit
of Pope, and an evidence of the engaging character of
Gay, that the " Fan " excited the interest instead of
the jealousy of the poet, whose malice was on the alert
against rivals so little formidable as Ambrose Philips
and Tickell. Let us quote from Gay's description of
the work of the Cupids, published on the 8th of
December, 171 3 :

" A different toil another forge employs ;
Here the loud hammer fashions female toys.
Hence is the fair with ornaments supplied,
Hence sprung the glittering implements of pride ;
Each trinket that adorns the modem dame
First to these little artists owed its frame.
Here an unfinished dVmond crosslet lay^
To which soft lovers adoration pay;
There was the polished crystal bottle seen,
That with quick scents revives the tnodish spleen ;
Here the yet rude unjointed snuff-box lies,
Which serves the rallied fop for smart replies;
There piles of paper rose in gilded reams.
The future records of the lover's flames ;
Here clouded canes 'midst heaps of toys are found.
And inlaid tweezer cases strew the ground.
There stands the Toilette, nursery of charms.
Completely fumish'd with bright beauty's arms ;
The patch, the powder-box, pulville, perfumes.
Pins, paint, a flatf ring glass, and black lead combs."

Who can help thinking of Belinda's toilet here?

JOHN GAY 123

But the superior artist first published those new
touches to his delightful poem on March 2, 17 14. On
the other hand, Gay's " diamond crosslet " —

" To which softs lovers adoration pay,"

The " clouded canes " ; and the snuff-box —

"Which serves the rallied fop for smart replies;"

are feeble reminiscences of that cross, which in 171 2

Belinda already —

"wore
Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore;"

and of the armoury with which Sir Plume was
furnished, the " clouded cane " which he nicely
"conducted" and the box which he rapped to
emphasize his demand for the restoration of the hair.
It is not often that literature offers us examples of two
poems so coincident in date and cognate in theme,
which so well exemplify the difference between genius
and mere dexterity. The two friends must have been
cognisant each of the other's work ; but there could
be no rivalry between them. The same materials in
the hands of the one receive life and movement, point
and grace ; in the hands of the other, they are little
more than an amusing inventory. But let us not deal
too unkindly with Gay, because he thus serves, as Pope
no doubt foresaw, as ^.foil. The whole work is indeed
overladen with classic and other lumber, and "paint-
ings " of " the enamelled green." But if it had ended
with the first book, we should perhaps have been con-

124 JOHN GAY

tented to say of it that it was on the whole a pretty
little poem, and that, in the phrase of old-fashioned
criticism, the invention of the fan from the tail of Juno's
peacock was natural and probable. Yet we should
judge, after Johnson, who discusses part of this great
question as it appears in " Trivia " with due impressive-
ness, that this kind of invention was not G^y^s forte.
A modem reader dismisses such matters in more
summary fashion ; and is satisfied with finding the
history of .the " patten '* mildly entertaining, and the
origin of the shoeblack disgusting. The main interest
of " Trivia " was always in its realities ; men of that
day, as of all days, delighted to read the life they knew
well described with some appearance of art The mere
photography of prose needed to be coloured with
malice and innuendo^ as in Swift's " Polite Conversa-
tion " or " Directions to Servants." For Gay the pomp
of verse and occasional similes served the same pur-
pose of amusing. There was a great and acknowledged
resemblance between Swift and Gay in these " touches
of things common " ; we can scarcely add " till they
rose to touch the spheres." Swift had anticipated Gay
in " Morning " and in the " City Shower," selecting —
after his fashion — London life at its dirtiest moment
The misanthrope and the man of " mild affections "
had both of them the eye of a Dutch painter, the
humour and the coarseness of the Dutch caricaturist ;
and Swift liked to suggest congenial subjects to his
" brother of the brush." But there is a great part of
"Trivia" which, divested of its mock heroic tone,

JOHN GAY 125

would pass simply for useful information ; *we can con-
ceive the country squire making it his text-book in the
prospect of a visit to London ; the comic notion of an
index, which Gay had already adopted in "The
Shepherd's Week," may in "Trivia" have served a
purpose not altogether burlesque. What directions
are more useful than those which tell men where to
get the best food ? On the other hand, what simpler
than to say, " Buy your mutton in Newgate Market,
your beef in Leadenhall, your veal in St. Jawies," etc. ?
But the utility of such counsels is not impaired in the
form :

" Shall the large mutton smoke upon your boards ?
Such Newgate's copious market best affords.
Would'st thou with mighty beef augment thy meal ?
Seek Leaden-hall ; St. James's sends thee veal ;
Thames-street gives cheeses ; Covent-garden fruits ;
Moor-fields old books ; and Monmouth-street old suits.
Hence mayst thou well supply the wants of life,
Support thy family, and clothe thy wife."

A curious feature of " Trivia " on this practical side
of it is its minute particularity in the article of clothing.
One cannot help thinking of Gay's apprenticeship to
a silk-mercer : " How long he continued behind the
counter," says Johnson, " or with what degree of soft-
ness and dexterity he received and accommodated the
ladies, as he probably took no delight in telling it,
cannot be known." But his occupation left its traces
both in his person and in his pen. At the close of
171 3 he is banteringly described by Pope to Swift as.

126 JOHN GAY

" An unhappy youth, who writes pastorals during the
time of divine service ; whose case is the more deplor-
able, as he hath miserably lavished away all that silver
he should have reserved for his soul's health on buttons
and hoops for his coat" Surely the origin of this
spruceness is not far to seek. And the wear suitable
for every season is described in "Trivia" with an
exactitude which we could scarcely find except among
experts. Thus of coats in winter he writes :

" Now in thy trunk thy D*oily habit fold,

The silken drugget ill can fence the cold ;

The frieze's spongy nap is soak'd with rain.

And showers soon drench the camlet's cockled grain,

True Witney broadcloth with its shag unshorn,

Unpierced is in the lasting tempest worn."

Indeed, this learning proved too profound for the
general reader, and in a note to a later edition Gay
explains that Witney is a town in Oxfordshire, With
the same precision he describes the risks of soiling
which vary with the attire ; he who wears the " reverend
gown" must beware especially of contact with the
barber, the perfumer, and the baker ; those who walk
in " youthful colours " must avoid the chimney-sweep,
the small-coal-man, the dustman, the chandler, and
the butcher.^ The fop and the miller are also a danger,

^ We are reminded of poor Kit Smart's wonderful simile :

** Thus when a barber and a collier fight
The barber beats the luckless collier white;
The dusty collier heaves his ponderous sack,
And big with vengeance, beats the barber black;

JOHN GAY 127

for from both a powder, though of difTerent sorts, is
apt to fly. A certain side of the business life of
London is known to him after an intimate and peculiar
fashion ; under his guidance we enter the linen-draper's
in wintry weather, and find the shop ladies keeping
themselves warm with battledore and shuttlecock from
counter to counter, while the needles lie useless in the
half-whipt muslin ; and passing out, we go into Covent-
garden, where the glaziers and truant 'prentices and a
motley crowd are playing football with such vigour
that we look about us for shelter.

We get from " Trivia " the impression of a street-life
rougher, scarcely less noisy, but more leisurely, than
the street-life now. We feel that almost all the perils
of the day in the London of 1716 might have been
avoided by a few civil conventions and the most rudi-
mentary police. But government was not paternal in
those times, and educated its public only as old Mr.
Weller educated Sam. Even correction was boisterous,
and Gay, always solicitous for the outward man, advises
you to give the pillory a wide berth, lest the turnips
and addled eggs designed for the " perjured head "
should salute your own. Man, the unit, was all in all
in encountering these perils ; when the bully cocked
his hat as you approached him, it was for your firmness
and resolution to decide whether he or you went into

In comes the brick-dust man, with grime o'erspread,
And beats the collier and the barber redj
Black, red and white in various clouds are tossed,
And in the dust they raise the combatants are lost."

ixS JOHN GAY

tke WBoody crTniri The post, fitdi^ co un tefpart in
the T/nrvn of the c ^lil r ri i lli ce n t my todie kmgrows
of Hennes bosts is an Athenian street in die days of
Pcndes, or the tall lamp-posts of to-day, was at once
jnor danger and your saSegnaid ; if yon were heedless
in your walk or i mp ei tin ently cnrioos yoa were sure
to ran agamst it ; hot it was die only, thoi]^;h very in-
snfRrient, hairier b e twe en yoa and chariots, wiaggcHis,
and sedan-chaiis. These last often intruded ; for the
chairmen were, it is well known, a buriy and aggressive
generati(xi ; supported by the insolent footmen who
escorted with torches die great dame to midnight
assemblies, they trespassed within the limits with im-
punity ; and the poet ofl^n knocked his knees against
the poles of chairs left standing at the doors. But
sometimes, as in the pass of St Clement Danes, the
pedestrian found himself —

" Where not a post protects the narrow space,"

and pushed his way stooping under the low penthouses,
whilst beside him waggoners slashed at each other
from their high seats, or fought with fists afoot ; and
blaspheming drovers urged thefrightenedcattlethrough
the press. With a little more intensity and purpose
Gay might be called the Hogarth of the pen; he
leaves on you the same impression of squalor and in-
sufficient light The rails in the squares are lined
with rows of whining beggars ; but the man who stops
to listen to a piteous plaint at night is likely to be
felled to the ground by the crutch which has moved
his compassion. The link-boys were often in league

JOHN GAY 129

with these dissemblers, and helped them to rifle your
pockets after extinguishing the light Queer forms of
theft were in vogfue, especially at nightfall. If you
turned into a crowd your sword was apt to be stolen
from its scabbard, or your wig removed from your
head by a boy carried in a basket. A worse terror
were the Mohawks, whose prototypes the old blind
indignaiit bard of " Paradise Lost ** had in mind, in his
darkness and solitude when he wrote of —

" luxurious cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers
And injury and outrage, and when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.''

These Mohawks, of whom Swift wrote to Archbishop
King in 17 12 that they were "still very troublesome,
and every night cut somebody or other over the face,
and commit a hundred insolent barbarities," were " still
very troublesome " in 1716 ; the more innocent
" Nicker " was still breaking windows with half-pence.
To remedy these mischiefs watchmen shook their
lanterns, and gathered at this signal for a promiscuous
running-in, from which it was possible to escape by
feeing the palm.

" Happy Augusta ! law-defended town,**

exclaims Gay, without the slightest touch of irony.
He counted himself blessed because he was not liable
to be stabbed, and because London churches gave no
sanctuary to murderers. Perhaps this comfortable
optimism, this complete absence of the " divine discon-

K

130 JOHN GAY

tent," may help to account for the fact that, for so
many years afterwards, the capital was still suffering
from the spasmodic energy of its guardians, evils worse
than the good-natured supineness of Dogberry and
Verges. In 1742, as Horace Walpole tells us, it was
given to these gentlemen to anticipate in London the
horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta. They swept,
without distinction, six-and-twenty women of the
poorer classes into St Martin's Roundhouse. " One
poor wretch said that she was worth eighteen-pence,
and would gladly give it for a glass of water, but in
vain ! " Six victims died of suffocation, one a poor
creature who was returning home late from washing :
" The same men, on the same night, took up Jack
Spencer, Mr. Stewart, and Lord George Graham, and
would have thrust them into the roundhouse with the
poor women if they had not been worth more than
eighteen-pence ! "

We must compare Horace with Juvenal, or Gay's
" Trivia " with Johnson's " London," if we would realize
how diverse are the moods that are called up by the
same scenes, the same bricks and mortar. Johnson's
imitation is more than an ingenious exercise to turn a
penny; in his "injured Thales" the indignation of
Umbricius after many centuries flames up anew. Yet,
strange as it seems, as we look at that famous third
satire once more, it is Gay rather than Johnson that
we ask to supply us with the external counterpart to
the life of old Rome ; the chariots rattling past each
other in the narrow street ; the herds brought to a

-%

JOHN GAY 131

standstill, whilst the drovers shout and curse; the
civic magnate in his palanquin speeding to pay early
court to the wealthy ; even the huge waggon groaning
beneath the weight of the quivering pine is balanced
in Gay's picture, though the dapper Londoner has no
tragic climax to the overturning of Ats ponderous
beam, no middle-class Hector crushed beneath it and
forgotten, whilst the unsuspecting household is pre-
paring for his return. Perhaps neither " London " nor
" Trivia " will ever be mucA read any more ; yet
" Trivia " has the better chance, for human indignation
does not bum like fire for ever, but curiosity is an en-
during passion. Gay is the more likely to profit by
that irony of literary history which gives men signifi-
cance through their very lack of earnest purpose. Time,
an ally not subject to casualties, works with those who
are content to describe things as they are, and show us
the men of their own generation " in their habits as
they lived " ; the stars in their courses fight a battle for
their fame ; in the retrospect of posterity an imagina-
tion more potent than theirs make ghosts grow vivid
in proportion as bodies crumble into dust

Gay's imagination worked slowly, as he found when
he set himself to invent fables. " How comes friend
Gay to be so tedious ?" (meaning dilatory) writes Swift
to Pope. " Another man can publish fifty thousand
lies sooner than he can publish fifty fables^ We
are assured that these fables are Gay's sole title to the
position which he has held among English writers for
a century and a half; he is,|then, one among many

132 JOHN GAY

instances of the immortality achieved by pleasing the
simplest minds ; the immortality of Bunyan and Defoe,
of La Fontaine and La Motte Fouqu6 ; the real as dis-
tinguished from the literary or esoteric immortality
even of Swift. And yet, as Mr. Austin Dobson and
Mr. Underhill remind us, Gay's fables are not exactly
masterpieces. One naturally compares him with La
Fontaine, but the comparison at once suggests a very
essential difference. For La Fontaine really seems to
live the life of his creatures, and to give them just the
articulate speech which, if they could, they would use.
" By Jove," says an impertinent squireen, in one of
TroUope's novels, to the Irish parson who has been
describing with unerring precision the course which
the fox must have taken, and the motives which must
have guided him, " I believe you were once a fox
yourself." To fit the same theory of transmigfration to
La Fontaine we should have to suppose that he was
once the whole animal kingdom. Of this versatility
Gay has no trace.^ Read the fable of "The De-
generate Bees," for instance, and vexed at a silly

^ We must except his monkeys. They are not so happily
imagined as the monkeys in the " Jungle Books,'' but their con-
ceit is well rendered :

" how fantastic is the sight
To meet men always bolt upright,
Because we sometimes walk on two !
I hate the imitating crew ! "

But the power to give characteristic speech to the animal world
was not largely bestowed in the interval between La Fontaine
and Rudyard Kipling.

JOHN GAY 133

disguise which amounts to nothing more than the
mention of a hive and some cells, you will ask angrily,
"Why bees?" There is really more of personation
in Gay's " Pins and Needles " than in his living things.
The main purpose of his menagerie is to depreciate
man ; and a curious and systematic reader, who should
take Gay seriously, would discover that the only animal
upon whom man can look down from a higher moral
elevation is — of all creatures in the world — the turkey.
Gay belongs to a fashionable school, in which there
was but one sincere professor ; and even the terrible
earnestness of Swift was as powerless as the affecta-
tion of the rest to disturb the latent satisfaction of
humanity. Most of those extremely comfortable
people, who placed their own species in the most un-
favourable contrast with the brute creation, would have
opened their eyes wide could they have lived into the
generation which at the close of the century did its
utmost to make their meaning good. The monotonous
abundance of these opinions was an evidence how
lightly they were held ; the seed might fructify some
day, but for the present " it sprung up quickly because
it had no depth of earth." It is customary to think
of the eighteenth century as somewhat limited in its
scope ; but it is probable that no period ever offered
so many counsels of perfection to men. In these
days, when dietary questions have assumed a gravity
which almost tempts us, against our better know-
ledge, to transfer the mechanism of thought to the
gastric regions, one laughs when one thinks of poets

134 JOHN GAY

mostly corpulent, and almost to a man self-indul-
gent, supplying texts to the vegetarians who now
preach with religious fervour the new cultus of St
Cabbage. Thackeray complains that his " Mrs. Spec "
considers cold mutton the natural food of man. But
nothing seems to excite the disgust of the austere
epicures who loved turtle soup and pAti-de-foie-gras
whenever they could get it, so much as the fact that
man eats mutton. It was all part of a general hypo-
crisy, innocent because too simple to deceive a baby.
The good lady who professed to discover from the
writings of Thomson, who was lazy, dirty, and luxuri-
ous, that he was an early riser, a " great swimmer and
rigorously abstinent," was clearly a soul sent pre-
maturely to earth ; she was meant to have been bom
in the nineteenth century, somewhere near Rydal
Mount. It was a widespread epidemic which we are
here noting. There was so much make-believe in the
talk of all classes and callings that a man of downright
character like Johnson was apt to laugh at professions
of public sentiment of any kind. Johnson said —
" When a butcher tells you that his heart bleeds for
his country, he has, in fact, no uneasy feeling." These
were, according to him, notions that helped to amuse
the people, and keep off the taedium vitae. Perhaps
a man who had seen the pressing dangers of '45 re-
garded by a menaced public with a mixture of supine-
ness and curiosity, might be excused for holding firmly
to the opinion which he gave to Goldsmith for his
« Traveller " :

JOHN GAY 135

** How small, of all that human hearts endure
The part that laws or kings can cause or cure ! "

The American colonies, which he prophesied would
never revolt, must have supplied him with uncomfort-
able evidence that in politics the gaseous may become
solid ; the French Revolution, which taught the same
lesson, he did not live to see. But his memory might
furnish him with many facts to strengthen his views
or prejudices as to the insignificance of sentimental
discontents. In particular he knew exactly the
practical value of declamations (including his own)
against courtiers and pensioners ; he showed it by
accepting a pension. Such generalities courtly circles
could appraise like the rest of the world ; they could
easily smile at a language which each man there
might be employing in his turn. Thus Gay wrote
his fables for the young Duke of Cumberland, the
future " hero " of Culloden, whom, according to him,
the nation saw —

..." Grieve to hear distress
And pant already to redress,"

and whom he reminds that —

^ Cowards are cruel ; but the brave
Love mercy and delight to save ;"

and the freedom with which he talked about Court
servilities and intrigues excited. Swift tells us, some
comment ; but the Court itself, we are inclined to
think, r^arded all such impersonal satire as the
merest effervescence ; no more likely to bias the mind
of the young Prince than that early admonition to

136 JOHN GAY

clemency was likely to touch his heart in after days.
We quite believe that the post of Gentleman Usher to
the little Princess Louisa, which Gay rejected with so
much scorn, was by no means offered him as a slight,
but rather as a recompense, which was considered to
be nicely proportioned to the value of his counsels.

This plump Antaeus had no strength but when he
touched earth ; no feebler verses were ever scribbled
by any poet of name than his "Contemplation on
N^ht," or " Thought on Eternity." But his character,
if quite unsuited to these high themes, was amiable
and affectionate, and the nearest approach to a work
of genius which he left behind him is the description
of the men he knew, as given in " Mr. Pope's Welcome
from Greece." If Goldsmith's " Retaliation " did not
come between us and this earlier poem, we should be
more alive to the merits of Gay's genial and lively
sketch. What obese and hearty people he makes
strutting before us, with just a distinguishing touch
here and there that we may know them apart 1 Disney,
with his queer exclamation, "Duke!" invented, we
suppose, to avoid profane swearing ; Jervas, the robust
and debonair ; Dartneuf, gay joker :

" And wondering Maine so £at, with laughing eyes
(Gay, Maine, and Cheney, boon companions dear.
Gay £at, Maine fatter, Cheney huge of size).''

Above all, visible as in a votive picture :

" Honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches."

But it is time to take leave of Gay. We have said.

JOHN GAY 137

perhaps, more than enough to show that he was for-
tunate in his epoch, and that gifts such as his in our
day, when there is so much competition for the honour
of amusing us, would have given him a place much
lower than that which fortune has assigned him. But,
if we cannot " beat our pensive bosoms " over him, as
Pope bids us on pain of being excluded from the
number of " the worthy and the good," we may, at
least, admit him to be worth a little more than the
flippant epitaph he composed for himself, and treat
his memory with the good-humoured indulgence
which his friends extended to his life.

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKERS

WE are convinced that the " Poems of Ossian "
are a gigantic fraud. It is not necessary to
know Gaelic, or to have studied even in translation the
genuine relics of Gaelic poetry, to make this assertion.
We will admit that there are real fragments of this
poetry embedded here and there in the huge mass of
Macpherson's publications. But we do not acquit a
man of dishonesty because he passes a few good half-
crowns amid hundreds of his own coinage. We know
that this is a necessary trick of the game, and part of
the prudential wisdom of knavery.

We do not say that Macpherson began with im-
posture. His reluctance (at Moffat in 1759) to translate,
at the request of Home, the author of " Douglas," the
few fragments of Erse song which he then professed to
know, was probably quite genuine. It was innocent,
as far as it arose from his own imperfect knowledge of
Gaelic ; it was as objectionable as several other parts
of his character, as far as it was due to his egregious
vanity, and what he chose to call his " Highland pride,
alarmed at appearing to the world only as a translator."
We readily admit that the conceited lad thought that

^ "Life and Letters of James Macpherson.'* Bailey Saunders.
1894.

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER 139

the wretched rhymes he had already published, still-
bom though they fell from the press, were a better
title to fame than honest pains bestowed upon the old
poetry of his native hills. The meagre results of
strictly honest work in this direction would never have
satisfied his soaring genius, and even when he had
" translated " two epics he spoke of his achievement
with all the vainglory of original authorship.

We have Macpherson's own statements that of «
old documents he had the smallest possible supply : 1
" Scarce any manuscript to be followed, except, indeed,
a very few mutilated ones in a kind of Saxon characters,
which was [as] utterly unknown to the Highlanders as
either the Greek or Hebrew letters." This is what he
says when, towards the end of his life, he is defending
his design of publishing his Gaelic "originals " in Greek
(!) characters. But we need scarcely quote his evidence
for a fact admitted by his apologists. It is, however,
of importance that what he himself meant by the
" originals " should be clearly ascertained. By his own
showing the great bulk of what he published as the
poems of Ossian was taken down from oral recitation. {
By his own showing, therefore, when he talked of the
originals of " Fingal " and ** Temora," he could not, in
honesty, have meant much more than manuscripts in
Gaelic, quite recently written, corresponding with the
English which he printed. Such manuscripts, even if
they were complete, and even if they corresponded
word for word with "Fingal," "Temora," "Berrathon,"
and all the rest, were absolutely worthless, as Johnson

I40 OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER

declared, as evidence for the antiquity of these poems.
We are giving nothing away if we admit that all the
Gaelic of " Fingal " was on show in Becket's shop in
this form "in the year 1762 for the inspection of the
curious." The fact by itself does not even suffice to
prove that Macpherson, or any of his correspondents,
had heard any part of " Fingal " said or sung in the
Highlands or the Hebrides.

It is not surprising that the public, however curious,
made no response to the invitation to inspect in a
bookseller's shop documents not three years old,
utterly meaningless to the many who could not
read them, and quite unconvincing to the few who
could. That no one took the pains to visit the shop
and discover, by ocular demonstration, that the
evidence offered for "Fingal" there was nothing
more than this, is a sign of an age not very searching
in criticism of this kind. But that through this neglect
judgment went by default we utterly deny. Judgment
so far must be pronounced upon the evidence ; and it
is the witness himself who, in effect, tells us that his
evidence from written documents was worthless.

But even this worthless evidence was withheld for
"Temora." The indifference of the public to the
" originals " of " Fingal " made, according to Macpher-
son, any such pains to secure credit for his new venture
superfluous. He therefore contented himself with
publishing, with " Temora," a specimen of the Gaelic ;
and for that purpose fixed upon the seventh book.
We have a significant hint of the manner in which

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER 141

this specimen was produced. One of Macpherson's
helpers was the Laird of Strathmashie, and of him Mr.
Bailey Saunders tells us that —

''On his death in 1767 a manuscript is said to have
been found amongst his papers, containing the Gaelic of
the seventh book of *Temora' in his handwriting, with
numerous alterations and corrections, and headed * First
rude draft of the seventh book of " Temora." ' "

Let us keep clearly in mind what we learn or infer
from Macpherson himself as to the composition of
this poem. It is made up almost entirely of fragments,
taken down from recitation. These are placed by him
in their proper sequence, and so combined that they
form one narrative poem.^ The epic thus formed is
then divided by him into eight books. The division into
books is the last stage in the process.

It was therefore when the work was structurally
quite complete that Strathmashie was thus engaged
upon it. And what had he before him ? A complete
seventh book in Gaelic, or a complete seventh book in
English ? If the manuscript was Gaelic that, and not
his manuscript, was the "first rude draught." Nor
could it have been so very "rude" after all. It
consisted ex hypothesi of what had been so put

^ There are lyric passages in the text of " Temora '' obvious to
any reader, and commented on by Macpherson. These lyric
portions cannot amount to anything like a tenth part of the
whole poem. But he claims that he had originals for all the
narrative part of the epic as well, and in fact points out the
difference in style, in the original, between the narrative and the
lyric portions !

142 OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER

together by Macpherson himself that it made, in
Gaelic, an intelligible section of a complete and in-
telligible story. If it is urged that the Gaelic as
offered to Strathmashie was difficult, how had Mac-
pherson been able to understand each separate
fragment, and to assign it to its place in the epic?
Macpherson was admit tedly no good Gaelic scholar/
If necOTl3 understand his " origfinals " it was because
they were easy to understand, and the alterations
which an expert would need to make in the manuscript
which Macpherson submitted to him would involve no
great thought or trouble. This " first rude draft of the
seventh book of Temora, with numerous alterations
and corrections," can be reconciled only with one
supposition. Strathmashie was making a translation
from Macpherson's English. He was not revising, he
was composing, the Gaelic. He was translating into a
language, which, however well he may have known it,
he could seldom have had occasion to write, and its
literature consisted in reality only of a few scattered
lyrics, with the phraseology of which he had to bring
his version into some sort of harmony. His task was
not unlike that of the good Greek scholars who year
after year at Cambridge write a Greek ode after the

^ He once, Mr. Saunders says, wanted to ask a bard whether
he knew any poems about the Fingalians, but the words he
used really meant, "Do the Fingalians owe you anything?''
The man replied that if they did the bonds were lost, and he
believed that any attempt to recover them at that time of day
would be unavailing. Macpherson was foolish enough to be
offended.

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER 143

manner of Sappho, or the achievement of Professor
Jebb in rendering a poem of Browning's into the Greek
of Pindar. Under such conditions, " numerous altera-
tions and corrections " are inevitable even to the most
practised hands, before thecomposition is ready. Weare
not surprised, therefore, that the Laird of Strathmashie's
manuscript bore evidences of great searchings of heart.
Nor is it wonderful that the published specimen con-
tained, according to the Committee of the Highland
Society, some imperfections and modernisms. If these
" modernisms " were in manuscripts made from recita-
tion, which Macpherson handed to Strathmashie, what
becomes of the argument for the antiquity of Mac-
pherson's Ossian, based upon the conservative vigour of
oral tradition in the Highlands ? And above all, the
bona fides of the translator being the question at stake,
what had he to do but to produce the Gaelic materials,
just as he received them or took them down, out of
which he constructed this seventh book? He did
not, because he could not, do this. If there were such
materials their very paucity would have convicted him
of fraud.

Mr. Bailey Saunders considers it very unlikely that
Macpherson could have written the twenty thousand
lines of Ossianic poems in the brief period of three and
a half years. To us it is far more difficult to believe
that, however numerous his correspondents may have
been (and their number does not, perhaps, diminish
the difficulty), he collected in that brief period, mainly
from recitations heard in various parts of the High-

>44 OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER

lands, the same great mass of Gaelic, translated all
that mass, after avowed disputes as to the meaning of
many passages, and found for each contribution its
exact place in a series of twenty-one poems, two of
which are epics, and almost all of which are tales, and
very coherent tales too, corresponding in structure,
with marvellous fidelity, to the arguments which Mac-
pherson has prefixed to them. Such a feat of con-
structive criticism has no parallel in literary history ;
it is the work of more than one lifetime ; that it should
have been so rapidly, yet so completely, performed,
transcends all belief. In the alternative, that the g^at
bulk of these poems was of Macpherson's own com-
position, \ve see no difficulty whatever, after the pub-
lication of the " Fragments." The real business was
to find or make Iq^nds, plots, episodes. The g^real
Ossianic manner once formed could be reproduced ad
infimtum. It was, in Hamlet's phrase, as easy as
lying ; to which, indeed, it bore no small resemblance.
We do not quite s^ree with Johnson that " many men,
many women, and many children could have written
Ossian." But we certainly believe that many men,
and many women, ^\^n a few Gaelic names and a tale
to tell about them, could, after one perusal of *' Fingal "
or •* Temora,** turn out a poem which, bating perhaps
the felicities which appear at very rare intervals in Mac-
pherson's compilation, and prove that he had some
poetic gift, would pass for Macpherson-Ossianic In-
deed* that excellent lady, Mrs. Ann Grant, of Laggan,
when, in i/SS, she described with mingled delight and

^

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER 145

horror Macpherson's return to his own country, had
caught the style to perfection :

"^The bard of bards," she writes, " who reached the mouldy
harp of Ossian from the withered oak of Selma, and awakened
the song of other times, is now moving, like a bright meteor,
over his native hills ; and while the music of departed bards
awakens the joy of grief, the spirits of departed warriors lean
from their bright clouds to hear."

She could have gone on like that for ever, without
being much more tedious than her original. In fact,
nothing that we have ever come across rivals these
poems for monotony ; in this we shall be contradicted
by no one who has made, as we have made, the dread-
ful experiment of reading them from the first page to
the last. The monotony is exactly what we should
expect from a youth of excellent abilities, some poetic
gift, and some reading, shrewd enough to know that
to be safe he must not be venturesome, niust avoid
that sort of particularity which gives character and
interest to old epic poetry, and which either proves the
date of a poem or betrays the forger. Very seldom
does Macpherson depart from the convenient vague-
ness in which he was secure. It was indeed somewhat
venturesome to make his Ossian talk of Caracul (for
Caracalla) four years before that nickname was given,
and though it was urged by Dr. Whittaker, in general
no partisan of Macpherson, that the poet would
naturally speak of a man by the name by which he
came to be generally known, this apology is scarcely
satisfactory. The defeat of Caracul is in part the

L

1

146 OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER

theme of Comala, one of the most extravagant and
impossible of the shorter poems ; a piece dramatic in
structure, including five " persons " and a chorus of
bards ; and we remark, in passing, that it seems highly
improbable that it should have been obtained, in its
present form, from recitation. " This poem," Macpher-
son tells us, " is valuable on account of the light it
throws on the antiquity of Ossian's compositions.
The Caracul mentioned here is the same with Cara-
calla, the son of Severus, who in the year 211 com-
manded an expedition against the Caledonians." Now,
early in this very year (February 4) Severus died at
York ; and from the poem it appears that he was still
alive at the date of the battle ; we infer, therefore, that
" the son of the king of the world " made this invasion
beyond the northernmost limits of the empire, and
sustained a crushing defeat, in the depth of winter^ and
this, too, at the very crisis of his fortunes, his father
dying, and his brother and rival Geta, the favourite of
the soldiers whose lives were thus rashly thrown away.
That Roman history should know nothing of such an
event at such a time, nay, that the succession to the
empire should not have been affected by it, is a very
remarkable circumstance. That Severus was prepar-
ing for a summer campaign against the Caledonians
when his career was cut short by death is another fact
which renders this premature expedition altogether
incredible. We may, therefore, safely infer that at any
rate Macpherson's A.D. 211 must be wrong. It may be
urged that though Macpherson was so far in error, the

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER 147

poem may refer to a previous campaign. To this the
best answer is the poem itself, of which Macpherson
has perfectly interpreted the drift It speaks of the
defeat of the Romans as a final deliverance, which
caused " the wings of their pride " to " spread in other
lands." We may dismiss with contempt, or something
worse, Macpherson's impudent pretence that this name
" Caracul " establishes the antiquity of his Ossian. Yet
no other pretence is tenable. Ossian is describing a
victory won by his own father. The name of the
defeated prince could not be for him derived from
historic literature. And even if we attribute the poem
to some later bard, — if among barbarous tribes pem'tus
toto divisos orbe^ the name of a hostile leader survives,
it is because it has been caught from contact with the
invaders and retained in a form more or less corrupt.
That the name " Caracalla " could never have been
heard, or thus transmitted, by the victorious barbarians,
has been shown. If, therefore. Caracul is Caracalla, it
would be hard to fix for " Comala " a date at all com-
patible with the remote antiquity claimed for that poem ;
we must trace it to the dawn of historic study in the
North. But be it remembered that, as Blair says, these
poems must be anterior to the establishment of the clan
system (itself very ancient), for they contain no men-
tion of it. This is a perfectly true inference from their
contents ; and therefore Macpherson was more saga-
cious than some of his defenders in claiming for them
a very early date, and attributing them to Ossian him-
self. He committed himself, however, in this instance

148 OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER

by being too particular. He justifies exactly the sus-
picion Gray derived from his letters, which were, he
says, " calculated (one would imagfine) to deceive, and
yet not cunning enough to do it cleverly." ^

It would be interesting could we know more of the
way in which Macpherson dealt with the few old
documents that came into his hands. We can quite
believe that " he parted very reluctantly with what-
ever he had succeeded in obtaining." One or two
ancient manuscripts were a very necessary addition to
the display of evidence in Becket's shop. But beyond
the statement of Mr. Macneill, Minister of Hovemore,
in South Uist, that " the original of * Berrathon ' was
contained in an important manuscript which, with
three or four more, Macmhuirid in his presence gave
to Macpherson, who bound himself in writing to return
them," we have found nothing in Mr. Bailey Saunders's
book to connect old MSS. with Macpherson's Ossian.
Of the value of this testimony our readers are as com-
petent as ourselves to judge. What was the antiquity
of the " important " manuscript, and how far it cor-

^ It was urged that "caracul" really means in Gaelic "fierce-
eyed," and that Macpherson was only mistaken in identifying
the name with Caracalla. If there was a " son of the king of
the world" known to his contemporary Ossian as "Caracul,"
and afterwards called in another part of the world, and with a
perfectly different signification, " Caracalla," the coincidence is
certainly startling. It is scarcely necessary to say that by
Ossian is meant Macpherson's Ossian, the Ossian in whom
Macpherson believed, the Ossian whose date he approximately
assigned, the contents of all the Ossianic poems published by
him squaring far better with that "floruit'* than with any other.

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER 149

responded with " Berrathon," are, we suppose, questions
now beyond solution. But an extract supplied by
Mr. Saunders, from the journal of John Mackenzie,
on July 22, in the year (apparently) 1789, may assist
our judgment a little :

"Went at one o'clock to Putney-common, to Mr. Mac-
pherson. He said he had been searching in an old trunk
upstairs, which he had with him in East Florida, for the
original of * Berrathon.' That he feared it was in an im-
perfect condition, and that part of it was wanting, as of
* Carthon ' ; that he had only put together a few lines of it,
and those not to his own liking ; that he had tired of it after
a short sitting."

We suppose that this was not the "important manu-
script" itself which Macpherson had bound himself in
writing to " return." On any hypothesis, however, we
find by " combining," as the editor of the " Eatanswill
Gazette" would say, "our information," that the
English of "Berrathon" lacks any sort of warrant.
Another fact of very distinct significance Mr. Saunders
relegates to a footnote. He tells us in the text that
the Macdonalds had great difficulty in getting back
from Macpherson the "Red Book" upon which the
family set great store. But we learn also from the
note on p. 131 that Campbell, of Islay, who examined
this book in 1873, "found no poem in it which could
be the original of any part of Macpherson's Ossian."

It would be tedious, even if we had space, to pro-
duce all the indications which these pages afford,
pointing to one and the same conclusion. We are

4

ISO OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER

simply amazed at the facility with which, up to the
first years of the present century, every one at all
deeply interested in the subject, except, perhaps, David
Hume and Gray, assisted, unwittingly, at a great
process of concoction. Even John Mackenzie, who,
as secretary of the Highland Society, might have
known his real duty better, seems to have virtually
helped (by way of furnishing "originals") to turn
Macpherson's English into Gaelic ; and Blai r, who
was Macpherson's great voucher with the British
public, and professed to have seen him at work,
laboured, according to his protigi^ under " much want
of information on the subject " when he opposed the
project of printing the Gaelic in Greek characters, and
by his own acknowledgment knew nothing of that
language. To make the good or ill fortune of Mac-
pherson's evidences complete, we are told that his
MS., at one time in the Advocates' library, unaccount-
ably disappeared, and that his diary, " which is said to
have contained some information as to the collection
of the poems, was stolen, probably by a servant, shortly
after Sir David Brewster's death in 1868."

Strangely as John Mackenzie himself went to work,
It is perfectly clear that the Highland Society, though
their conclusions were timidly and feebly expressed,
could, only forty years after Macpherson's labours,
find no such connected tales as he published, nothing
in fact but fragmentary lyrics — of which no one
questions that he made some use. That they found
" no one poem the same in title and tenour with his

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER 151

publications" is unaccountable if we are to believe
that he found, even for his many shorter poems, the
raw material of coherent fables ; for even when the
body of a song is lost, the last thing to perish is some
indication of its general drift. Moreover, Macpher-
son's defenders are inconsistent with themselves in
attributing such great effects to the official discourage-
ment of Gaelic. The tenacious patriotism which
could retain through many centuries the substance
(bating the necessary links) of twenty thousand lines,
could scarcely, in forty years, have so far yielded to
foreigfn pressure as to retain no vestige of those
memories except in a few fragments.

Again, we differ from Mr. Saunders, inasmuch as
we believe that Macpherson, with his "Highland
pride," reveals clearly enough his ambition, even in
connection with Ossian, to figure as an original genius.
What else is to be made of such expressions as
these ? —

** Without vanity I say it, I think I could write tolerable
poetry ; and I assure my antagonists that I should not trans-
late what I could not imitate." " A translator who cannot
equal his original is incapable of expressing its beauties."

What is the " profound truth " which Mr. Saunders
supposes this second sentence to contain ? Taken by
itself it is either false or a mere truism. If it means
that none should translate a poet but those who can
rival hini in creative power, it means that Homer and
Dante should have remained untranslated. Interpreted
by the first sentence, and by the high place on Par-

152 OSSIAN AND HIS MAKiER

nassus which Macpherson gives to his Ossian, its
significance becomes quite plain. It is Macpherson's
way of telling the world, " These are works of un-
rivalled genius, but I could rival them if I pleased."
Conscious that he was the real author of efforts which
passed for sublime, he was specially galled by a defence
of their genuineness, based on his supposed incompet-
ence to produce them ; and he coveted the honour
and glory of a poet of the first rank, without the odium
which attached to those literary rascals, his countrymen
Bower and Lauder.

We cannot agree with Mr. Saunders that there is
" as good a case for the authenticity of the Ossianic
poems as for that of the Edda or the Nibelungenlied,"
but if we could believe that " the old writers who gave
those works to the world " had only the same quantufn
of material as came into the hands of Macpherson we
should still question, from a moral point of view, his title
to rank with them. Every writer has a duty to his age,
and to the standard of candour and fidelity which his
own generation prescribes ; and Macpherson's was an
age critical in everything except — and it was a lucky
exception for him — the skill of the expert in detecting
imposture.* Though he never could have become so

* This is advisedly written. Psalmanazar, Bower, Lauder,
were clumsy impostors, and it required no great skill to detect
them. That part of the confutation of Chatterton which is based
upon a knowledge of the earlier stages of our language belongs
in the main to the present century. That there should have
been so much of this sort of brigandage in the eighteenth century
indicates an inefficient police.

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER 153

important a figure as he thought himself, we are con-
vinced that he would have achieved a fame in litera-
ture quite as great and much less sinister if he had
been more honest His promise must not be esti-
mated by his early rhymes ; for these are Aberdonian.
Yet they are not a whit worse than Thomson's, at the
same period of life. Of his blank verse, Mr. Saunders
tells us that " it betrays the study of classical models
rather than any capacity for direct observation," but
this is precisely what we have noted in several de-
scriptive passages in Ossian, otherwise sufficiently
striking, which seem to betray themselves by a certain
incongruity. Be that as it may, when in "The Hunter"
Macpherson writes:

"... Now and then the breathing breezes sigh
Through the half-quivering leaves, and, far removed.
The sea rolls feeble murmurs to the shore " —

we have just the sort of scenic effect in which his
Ossian abounds. And let any one read that fragment
of a Norse tale which in his Preface (1773) Mac-
pherson first gives in his Ossianic prose, and then in
the conventional rhymed heroics of his day and it will
be seen with what facility he could pass from the one
manner to the other. He is probably at his best in
some dramatic touches, such as he perhaps really
found in the fragment that fascinated Gray —

"Are these his groans in the gale ?
Is this his broken boat on the shore ? "

or such as he more probably invented in " Croma " :

J

154 OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER

" I gave my arm to the (blind) king ; he felt it with his
aged hands. The sigh rose in his breast, and his tears came
down. * Thou art strong, my son,' he said, * but not like the
King of Morven.' "

We are not inclined to depreciate the abilities of
any man who could so notably influence the literature
of Europe, and captivate for a while the greatest
European minds. Whatever was the source of Mac-
pherson's imagery, he gave it for a time the charm of
novelty, and, floated on the stream of romance, his
large but unsubstantial craft carried a little valuable
freight. We do indeed suspect that the ^^ sounding
shells," of which he had so plentiful a stock, are
nothing but the classic testudo adopted by him for a
drinking- vessel ; but now and then he has fared better
with his merchandise; his heroes for example who
"hum surly songs" may be the musical ancestors
of the Roundhead in Tennyson's " Talking Oak."
Though it was not, pace Mrs. Barrett Browning,
" mountain winds that swelled out " Ossian's vest, but
in the main the breath of James Macpherson, that
breath had some little power. Some permanent re-
sults of the Ossianic movement may be traced
even in the later literature which boasted a com-
plete emancipation from its influence. His be-
setting sin is, as we have said, nionotony ; there is a
terrible facility for the young poet in Sealing with the
elementary forces of nature, and, if he is encouraged,
he is certain to abuse it ; even the sun in such hands
palls upon us, and before we close " Ossian," we have

OSSIAN AND HIS MAKER 155

a perfectly Satanic hatred of his beams. Yet the
fault itself, under all the circumstances, was necessary
to an ephemeral success, for that which is fragmentary
has but little vogue ; and one of the lessons of this
strange episode in the history of literature is that the
world, even the discerning world, is influenced by
mere volume, and receives impressions not only of the
reason but of the imagination, by dint of much re-
petition.

COVENTRY PATMORE'

IN these volumes we may study one of the most
striking apparent contrasts which English litera-
ture has ever exhibited. Whether the contrast will
please or not will depend, in a measure at any rate,
upon the bias and temperament of the reader ; but the
critic will find his first and perhaps his principal plea-
sure in noting it, and drawing from it such instruction
as he may.

.It is possible that many of those who know Coventry
Patmore mainly, if not only, as the author of the
" Angel in the House," have inferred that the genius
which lavished its wealth so profusely upon the felici-
ties of domestic life was capable of a more ambitious
theme. Not of course that we are inclined to dispar-
age a subject which, as long as it is the poet's function
to discourse —

'' Of man, of nature, and of human life,"

must be one of the very worthiest But in this instance
we recognize a self-imposed limitation ; a range of
thought and feeling conditioned by the surroundings
of a particular and highly cultivated class. These re-

* Coventry Patmore. Poetical Works. 2 vols. 1886.

COVENTRY PATMORE 157

finements upon emotions themselves refined belong to
a society carefully guarded from the troubles and
dangers which are necessary to heroic action or passion.
Censorious criticism calls the " Idylls of the King " a
boudoir e^\c \ but the term belongs less unquestionably
to the " Angel in the House " and " The Victories of
Love." The boudoir epic of the last century was " The
Rape of the Lock," and we are conscious of a growth
in seriousness and a changed conception of the function
of poetry, when we reflect that we now demand some
moral purpose from our poets even when their material
is most artificial and luxurious.

It will seem to some readers a sort of sacrilege to
bring such poems as Coventry Patmore's into any
relation with the obsolete literature of satire and
badinage. Yet their epigrammatic character is certainly
a heritage from a very different past. With a position
almost unique in literature, and with a strong character
of originality, Coventry Patmore nevertheless is what
he is partly by wide and careful study. Sometimes,
indeed, not only the art, but the thought itself, is
borrowed. The lines in "Tamerton Church Tower":

" A Mary in the house of God,
A Martha in her own,"

have long ago passed into a proverb. Few people, we
imagine, know that this beautiful epigram has been
passed on to our poet through the frivolous hands
of Horace Walpole, who found an epitaph ending
"Mundo Martha, Maria Deo." Yet the thought,

158 COVENTRY PATMORE

however he came by it, belongs to Coventry Patmore of
right, so germane is it to that faculty of antithesis
in which he is a consummate master, and which he
exercises generally with great refinement and little
exaggeration.

We have spoken of a self-imposed limitation in
Coventry Patmore's work. The power of seizing and
describing character which he exercises, within those
limits, in his earlier poems gave promise of the sym-
pathetic treatment of character in a wider choice from
all sorts and conditions of men. At least the faculty
was there ; the bar to its use would be, if anything,
the lack of the same interest in men in the mass.
Now, the lower classes of society, as far as they appear
at all in the " Angel in the House," bask in the rays
reflected upon them by their social superiors. As long
as they remain in this ^^^-feudal relation they are
respectable, though ungrammatical, objects of interest.
The prattle of the housekeeper faithfully represents
this character :

« Well, Mr. Felix, Sir, Tm sure

The morning's gone off excellent !
I never saw the show to pass

The ladies, in their fine fresh gowns
So sweetly dancing on the grass

To music with its ups and downs.
We'd such work, Sir, to clean the plate," etc

Here a certain graphic power is observable — the
same power which we notice in "The Girl of All
Periods" and "Olympus" — but conditioned here by

COVENTRY PATMORE 159

the form and subject of the Jpoem. The question
which Coventry Patmore's subsequent writings suggest
is whether his sympathies are not permanently ham-
pered by the prejudice of class. With refined thought,
and wide sympathies, and the poet's eye for the world
of nature, we should have the elements of great poetry
ready to hand. What is it then that makes us feel
that " The Unknown Eros," etc., so great a contrast,
as we said at the outset, to Coventry Patmore's earlier
poems, as belonging more distinctly to the literature
of power, falls short of the same measure of success in
its own province ? His theme, in both of its main
aspects, is a noble one ; comparable, indeed, to Dante's.
He has his Florence and his Beatrice ; his degenerate
countrymen ; his earthly love foreshadowing a love
celestial and ideal. Dante is an evidence that it is
possible for genius to make political and even personal
antipathies immortal. But Dante has done this by a
faculty quite independent of the passion which sets it
to work ; the man " who had seen hell," and Purgatory
to boot, had a tremendous machinery at his command.
He does not succeed by making us share his animosi-
ties ; rather the terror and pity which he excites are
all in the interest of his victims. We care nothing for
the merits of Guelph or Ghibelline, or the sins of Pope
Nicolas n I. or Boniface VH I. ; the excessive partiality
of Simon of Tours for the eels of Bolsena has but a
curious interest for us. There is, besides, in Dante,
always something of the judicial tone ; and he con-
demns his dearest friends to the severest penal fires.

i6o COVENTRY PATMORE

But a modem poet, with a kindred intensity of con-
viction, has an uphill task if his readers are not at the
outset in sympathy with him. The commencement
of the poem •• 1867 "—

** In the year of the great crime
When the false En^sh Nobles and their Jew,
By God demented, slew
The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep firom wrong " —

which has appended to it the note :

'' In this year the middle and upper classes were disfran-
chised by Mr. Disraeli's Govemment, and the final destruc-
tion of the liberties of England by the Act of 1884 rendered
inevitable " —

is the statement of a particular view of very modem
politics, a statement crude in itself, and needing an
explanation, which, however, is cruder still ; a direct
slap in the face to perhaps two-thirds of Coventry
Patmore's readers, by way of encouraging them to do
justice to what follows. This is a drawback to which
the poet himself is something less than indifferent ;
we, who are but looking on, and trying to estimate his
work on purely critical grounds, cannot but see that it
is a drawback of a very serious kind. For the indig-
nation that finds its vent in poetry must interest us
either because we share it, or because it makes appeal
to a moral truth deeper than the occasion which
excites it, or because it is manifested in the plastic
power of a great imagination, presenting scenes which
fascinate us when judgment and sympathy are inert

COVENTRY PATMORE i6i

or even adverse. Thus the Hebrew Prophet lives still,
as the witness to a righteousness independent of time
and place, for those who have a very imperfect acquaint-
ance, or no acquaintance at all, with the circumstances
of his mission ; Dante lives because his Heaven and
Hell and Purgatory have been made almost visible to
our eyes, and he has made us believe for a while that
what we have seen there are the judgments of God,
little as we care now for Dante's opinions, his loves or
hates ; even Juvenal, though we are quite indifferent
to the character of Domitian, will live as long as men
continue to read with pleasure the proceedings of the
council gathered round the gigantic turbot, and can
admire the fierce burst of scorn with which that scene
is closed. What conditions of success analogous to
these does Coventry Patmore start with ? When the
decadence of England is a fact manifest to all men,
how many will attribute it precisely to " the disfran-
chisement of the upper and middle classes by Mr.
Disraeli's Government in 1867, ^tnd the final destruc-
tion of the liberties of England by the Act of 1884" ?
And yet that this, and nothing but this, is the explana-
tion of our downfall, Coventry Patmore assures us, in
a passage which we will quote at length, because it
seems to us to summarize his political creed :

"Ah, Land once mine
That seem'd to me too sweetly wise,
Too sternly fair for aught that dies,
Past is thy proud and pleasant state.
That recent date

M

i62 COVENTRY PATMORE

When, strong and single, in thy sovereign heart,

The thrones of thinking, hearing, sight.

The cunning hand, the knotted thew

Of lesser powers that heave and hew.

And each the smallest beneficial part,

And merest pore of breathing, beat

Full and complete.

The great pulse of thy generous might,

Equal in inequality,

That soul of joy in low and high ;

When not a churl but felt the Giant's heat,

Albeit he simply calPd it his.

Flush in his common labour with delight.

And not a village-maiden's kiss

But was for this

More sweet.

And not a sorrow but did lightlier sigh

And for its private self less greet.

The whilst that other so majestic self stood by !

Integrity so vast could well afford

To wear in working many a stain

To pillory the cobbler vain

And license madness in a lord.

On thai were all men well agreed;

And, if they did a thing.

Their strength was with them in their deed.

And from amongst them came the shout of a king."

The corruptions by which a nation is ruined are of
long standing, and particular enactments are their con-
sequences and not their causes. If we understand this
passage aright, up to a recent date all Englishmen
were agreed that the integrity secured by the governing
classes could safely tolerate the excesses of the aristo-
cracy, whilst it punished the free expression of opinion
on the part of the artisan. It would be easy to dis-

COVENTRY PATMORE 163

prove the fact of this consensus of opinion ; still easier
to expose a theory so crude as this, or to denounce a
moral standard so ignoble and invertebrate. But it is
sufficient to say that no great poetry can be built upon
such a foundation ; that the theme being what it is, all
the art, were it ten times as great as it is, employed in
embellishing it would be worse than thrown away.
The topic is worthy of the political and literary capacity
of Theodore Hook ; the morality would have been
warmly applauded by the followers of the Prince
Regent. When greater gifts are enlisted in such a
service we can only exclaim with Jaques, " O know-
ledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove in a thatched
house ! " Let the poet regret, if he pleases, the trans-
ference of power ; let him anticipate, by representing
as already full-grown, the evils which every change
accomplished without social convulsion, only gradually
develops ; let him idealize the past, and put a nimbus
round the heads of the privileged few, and he may
compel our admiration, if not our assent ; but it is an
artistic blunder of the worst kind to foist the mad but
licensed lord and the conceited and pilloried cobbler
into this goodly company ; to mingle harsh realities
with pleasant fictions, to tempt us to dream and
suddenly shake us up to think. It is as if some
unkind hand were to introduce into Mr. Dicksee's
" Passing of Arthur " the sketch of a Mohawk fighting
a watchman. And who can help reflecting, at our
poet's instigation, that the stains here noted as acci-
dental and negligable were radical defects in our

i64 COVENTRY PATMORE

" vast integrity " ; that h^ who tells the now " out-
lawed Best " :

" Know 'twas the force of function high
In corporate exercise, and public awe
Of Nature's, Heaven's, and England's law
That Best, though mixed with Bad, should reign
Which kept you in your sky ! "

should be the last to suggest that a system based upon
this principle could afford to license a contempt of that
virtue which is its very essence ? The nalfve revelation
of a class-feeling at the very point where a lofty
morality should supersede it deprives these poetical
jeremiads of any weight or impressiveness ; they are
Latter-day Pamphlets in which spleen and bitter con-
tempt, and a prejudice essentially vulgar, have usurped
the place of moral earnestness. Rhadamanthus, though
his methods are not ours, though, as Virgil tells us, he
first punishes and then hears, may be an august and
venerable figure ; but a Rhadamanthus in plush in-
spires no reverence or respect.

Compare for a moment Coventry Patmore with a
poet whom we should credit with less imaginative
power. Cowper's theme is also often the decadence
of England ; and, whilst we do not call " Expostula-
tion," or " Truth," or the " Progress of Error " great
poems, we maintain that they possess the essential
character of prophecy, in attacking corruption at its
root and source ; and that the cardinal error of de-
ploring change whilst palliating the servile toleration
of vice in high places, which must always make change

COVENTRY PATMORE 165

at last inevitable, was an error from which taste and
good sense and deep conviction kept Cowper wholly
free.

We could easily show by quotations that the feeling
which we here note is predominant in these poems ;
but that it is really characteristic will be manifest from
this, that it makes its appearance in a region of thought
where we should least of all expect it, and where it is
even shockingly incongruous. The worship of the
Virgin Mother will have, let us admit it freely, a
fascination for the human spirit as long as gentleness,
compassion, purity, and all the other graces that
contribute to form the ideal of perfect womanhood can
thus be enshrined and hallowed. The range of poetry
is not circumscribed by doctrine, and it is not always
the poetry of Roman Catholicism — often in this direc-
tion rhapsodical and sensuous — that has presented this
worship in its most attractive light for thoughtful and
cultivated minds. And certainly we know no parallel
to the strange mixture of celestial ecstasy and very
mundane scorn which Coventry Patmore offers us in
such poems as " The Child's Purchase." He seems to
have taken as his model the tone and sentiment of
" Sir Lob " in " Tamerton Church Tower " :

" I hate the herd that vulgar be
And, O, the stars are fair ! "

Surely, no loose, unlettered hind of Paganism ever
praised the gods more amiss than this Christian and
cultivated poet, for whom the parable of the Pharisee

1 66 COVENTRY PATMORE

and the Publican would seem to be a dead letter. Let

us hear him :

" Chief stone of stumbling ; sign built in the way

To set the foolish everywhere a-bray ;

Hem of God's robe, which all who touch are heal'd ;

To which the outside Many honour )rield

With a reward and grace

Unguess'd by the unwash'd boor that hails Him to His face,

Spurning the safe, ingratiant courtesy

Of suing Him by thee ;

Orapro me /"

We despair of representing in words the impression
which this sad medley of blessing and cursing has
made upon us. We have said that we know no parallel
to it. We beg pardon ; the parallel is to be found in
the last lines of Browning's " Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister,"

" 'St, there 's vespers ! Plena gratia
AvCy Virgo! Gr — r — r, you swine ! "

There are other poems in the same series — " Eros

and Psyche," " De Natura Deorum," and " Psyche's

Discontent" — the ethical scope and poetic value of

which we feel quite unable to discern, and of which

therefore the less said by us the better. There are

again poems more within our compass, the pessimistic

tone of which we find it hard to reconcile with any

Christian creed. Such is the short poem, " Magna est

Veritas '' :

" Here in this little bay.
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes.

COVENTRY PATMORE 167

Under high clifTs, and far from the huge town,

I ^it me down.

For want of me the world's course will not fail :

When all its work is done, the lie shall rot ;

The truth is great, and shall prevail.

When none cares whether it prevail or not."

It is pleasant to turn from these to those poems in
which, in spite of a certain fierce exaggeration, we dis-
cover a true corrective and guiding principle. As in
this from " The Two Deserts," which quaintly enforces
a favourite theme of our poet's, the happiness of limi-
tation :

" Put by the Telescope !

Better without it man may see.

Stretched awful in the hushed midnight.

The ghost of his eternity.

Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye

The things which near us be,

Till science rapturously hails,

In the minutest water-drop,

A torment of innumerable tails.

These at the least do live.

But rather give

A mind not much to pry

Beyond our royal-fair estate

Betwixt these deserts blank of small and great.

Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are,

Pressing to catch our gaze,

And out of obvious ways

Ne'er wandering far."

And certainly we have never met with anything in
literature more full of a pathetic desiderium than the
poem called " Departure," more instinct with tender-

i68 COVENTRY PATMORE

ness and compassion for the heart of childhood than
the " Toys." These things will live, for it is the
universally human which prevails in poetry, and
through this alone can poetry give weight to prejudices
in their own nature personal or ephemeral. In as far
as the poet forgets this he succeeds in spite of himself,
and only by virtue of that divine gift which no perverse
use can make altogether fruitless.

ENGLAND'S HELICON

MORE LYRICS FROM ELIZABETHAN

SONG-BOOKS
SIDNEY'S ASTROPHEL AND STELLA

THE rich abundance of imagery, the copious
vocabulary, the varied music of the Elizabethan
time was a common possession. These gifts, all or
some, belonged to men not remarkable for depth of
thought — to writers who had "more copie than weight,"
but who were possessed of that quick eye for resem-
blances and analogies which the author of " Euphues "
exhibits even more strikingly than the author of
" Hamlet." What is still more noticeable, they belong
to men who are in literature only the shadow of a
shade — who, though they were themselves —

"Faithful prophets who spake as beseemed the god and his
shrine,"

have hardly escaped that long night which buries
those who have had no sacred bard to sing their praises.
How many, beyond the privileged circle of professed
students of literature, have heard, for instance, of

170 ENGLAND'S HELICON, ETC.

Edmund Bolton? Yet Edmund Bolton could write

thus :

" As withereth the primrose by the river,
As fadeth summer's-sun from gliding fountains,
As vanisheth the light-blown bubble ever,
As melteth snow upon the mossy mountains ;
So melts, so vanisheth, so fades, so withers.
The rose, the shine, the bubble and the snow
Of praise, pomp, glory, joy (which short life gathers).
Fair praise, vain pomp, sweet glory, brittle joy.
The withered primrose by the mourning river,
The faded summer's-sun from weeping fountains,
The light-blown bubble vanished for ever.
The molten snow upon the naked mountains.
Are emblems that the treasures we uplay
Soon wither, vanish, fade, and melt away.

" For as the snow, whose lawn did over-spread
Th' ambitious hills, which giant-like did threat
To pierce the heavens with their aspiring head,
Naked and bare doth leave their craggy seat ;
When as the bubble, which did empty fly
The dalliance of the undiscemM wind,
On whose calm rolling winds it did rely.
Hath shipwreck made, where it did dalliance find ;
And when the sunshine which dissolved the snow.
Coloured the bubble with a pleasant vary.
And made the rathe and timely primrose grow,
Swarth clouds withdrawn (which longer time do tarry)—
Oh what is praise, pomp, glory, joy, but so
As shine by fountains, bubbles, flowers, or snow ? "

Shakespeare himself, we are tempted to say, could
scarcely have written finer lines than —

" Th' ambitious hills, which giant-like did threat
To pierce the heavens with their aspiring head,"

or —

ENGLAND'S HELICON, ETC. 171

" The dalliance of the undiscemM wind."

And that eclectic method, favoured by Matthew
Arnold, which assumes that the great masters of song
could put into a single phrase a note of distinction by
which they may be recognized, is hopelessly ship-
wrecked against such instances, which, coming in fact
from those who are least in fame, might well have
come from the very greatest. And who is "Ignoto"
who subscribes that lovely invocation of the " Shepherd
to his Flowers " :

" Your honours of the flowery meads I pray
You pretty daughters of the earth and sun " ?

Not Ralegh, as Mr. Bullen assures us, and, therefore,
possibly one of those many other men of practical
endeavour at this time, over whose life's course the
spirit of poetry breathed not as a trade-wind, but as
an occasional zephyr. One great fascination of col-
lections such as " England's Helicon," or the " Lyrics
from Elizabethan Song-books," of Mr. Bullen, is the
suggestion of an undercurrent of genius, to which
nothing now testifies but the bubbles on the surface ;
of a tribe of intellectual, but somewhat lazy giants,
who bore about with them in court or camp g^eat
powers for the most part dormant or inert, but displayed
upon occasion with as much vigour and facility as if
they were in constant exercise. It is an age in which
literature has not yet acquired the traditions of a craft,
an age in which none are experts, but all are experi-
mentalists, and the drama alone is moulded and con-
ditioned by popular appeal. The scholar and courtier

172 ENGLAND'S HELICON, ETC.

has, at such a time, every advantage, except that signal

advantage which a solicitude for posthumous fame

can alone secure. If Shakespeare himself had little or

nothing to do with gathering together "his sugared

sonnets among his private friends," how many men

even more careless and with less expectation than his

that—

" Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rime,"

may have sunk in those shipwrecks of time, after which,
in Landor's phrase, "hen-coops and empty barrels
bob upon the surface under a serene and smiling sky,
while the graven or depicted images of the gods are
scattered on invisible rocks " ?

Our Edmund Bolton has hardly escaped " on broken
pieces" to land. We confess to knowing nothing
more about him than Mr. Bullen tells us, or his own
unconscious revelation of himself in his verse suggests.
" One of the most learned men of his time," he wrote
"The Elements of Armories," and an interesting treatise
called "Hypercritica." He accompanied Buckingham
on his journey to Spain in 1623. He "laboured to
establish a Royal Academy or College of Honour * for
the breeding and bringing-upof the nobility and gentry
of this kingdom.' " We might conjecture that in social
status and intellectual mould he resembled Spenser —
more fortunate than Spenser in his life, but less secure
of immortality. A certain sad dignity belongs to his
style even in his lighter hour of song. He is religious
also, and we should like to believe that the author of

ENGLAND'S HELICON, ETC. 173

the beautiful Carol on the Nativity was a precursor of
Milton in the spirit as well as in the letter :

" * For lo ! the world's great Shepherd now is bom,
A blessed babe, an infant full of power ;
After long night uprisen is the mom,
Renowning Bethlem in the Saviour.

Spmng is the perfect day

By prophets seen afar ;

Spmng is the mirthful May

Which winter cannot mar.'
In David's city doth this sun appear,
Clouded in flesh ; yet, shepherds, sit we here ? " ^

We owe to Mr. Bullen the rescue from oblivion of a
remarkable poem by some unknown master-hand, the
reading of which has had much to do with our re-
flections upon the uncertainty of literary fame. We
are not surprised that Mr. Bullen writes, "I doubt
whether it would be possible for me to have lost
memory of that poem if I had ever seen it in print.
Verse so stately, so simple, so flawless is not lightly
forgotten." We suspect him of wonder that so noble a

^ We have assumed with Mr. Bullen that "E. B." in "England's
Helicon " is always Edmund Bolton, although his name is only
once subscribed in full. It would not be a less suggestive fact
if " E. B." were quite unknown to us. There is a " W. S." in
"England's Helicon," who is not William Shakespeare but
William Smith, author of " Chloris ; or, the Complaint of the
Passionate Despised Shepherd," 1596. The initials, W. S.,
have been a prolific source of error, not always, we may conjec-
ture, undesigned. Besides standing for William Shakespeare,
they have stood for William Smith and perhaps for Wentworth
Smith, and, according to Mr. Fleay, for Shakespeare's brother
actor, William Sly.

174 ENGLAND'S HELICON. ETC.

poem could have been so long unknoiini ; perhaps
even of doubt whether the case is really so. We, at
any rate, shall have no right to censure him, if this
treasure which he unearths from the Christ Church
MSS. should prove to be of less obscure origin than he
supposes. ■ It was set to music by John Ford ; the
abruptness of the opening either indicates that it is a
fragment, or belongs to the dramatic character which
marks it throughout :

*' Yet if his majesty, our sovereign lord.

Should of his oiK-n accord

Friendly himself invite.

And say, ' I'll be your guest to-morrow night,'

How should we stir ourselves, call and command

All hands to work ! ' Let no man idle stand.

Set me fine Spanish tables in the hall.

See they be fitted all ;

Let there be room to eat.

And order taken that there want no meat

See every sconce and candlestick made bright.

That without tapers they may give a light

Look to the presence : are the carpets spread,

The dais o'er the head.

The cushions in the chairs.

And all the candles lighted on the stairs ?

Perfume the chambers, and in any case

Let each man give attendance in his place.'

Thus if the King were coming would we do,

And 'twere good reason too ;

For 'tis a duteous thing

To show all honour to an earthly King,

And after all our travail and our cost.

So he be pleased, to think no labour lost

But at the coming of the King of Heaven

ENGLAND'S HELICON, ETC. 175

All's set at six and seven :

We wallow in our sin,

Christ cannot find a chamber in the inn.

We entertain Him always like a stranger,

And as at first still lodge Him in the manger."

The religious poet, we know, is at this time seldom
so dignified when he moves with so much life as he
does here — a quibble is the Cleopatra for which he
must be content to lose the ear of a modern world less
disposed to be "punned into salvation." Here, for
instance, is a bard we doubt not as earnest as Herbert,
but with more than Herbert's quaintness :

" My sins are like the hairs upon my head,
And raise their audit to as high a score.

In this they differ ; they do daily shed,
But ah my sins grow daily more and more :

If by my hairs thou number out my sins,

Heaven make me bald before that day begins."

But sometimes the touch of quaintness is more gentle,
and the thought developed is more than an idle play
of fancy, as in this (from John Danyel's " Songs for
the Lute, Viol, and Voice," 1606) :

" If I could shut the gate against my thoughts
And keep out sorrow from this room within,
Or memory could cancel all the notes

Of my misdeeds, and I unthink my sin :
How free, how clear, how clean my soul should lie,
Discharged of such a loathesome company !

Or were there other rooms without my heart
That did not to my conscience join so near.

Where I might lodge the thoughts of sin apart
That I might not their clam'rous crying hear ;

176 EXGLAXiyS HELICON, ETC

What peace, wiiat joy, what ease shoald I possess,
Fxced from the horrors that my sool possess !

But O my Savioor, Who my refiige art.
Let Thy dearmerdes stand 'twixt them and me.

And be the wall to sqiarate my heart
So that I may at length repose me free ;

That peace, and joy, and rest may be whhin.

And I remain divided from my sin."

If we prefer the serious muse, it is because she tells or
suggests more than her lighter-minded sisters. For
instance, how well the following memento moriy with its

*^ Vruat Eliza for an Ave Mary "

discloses the story of one who has lived on through
shifting and hazardous times into a changed world :

^ Time's eldest son, Old Age (the heir of ease,

Strength's foe. Love's woe, and foster to devotion)
Bids gallant Youth in martial prowess please ;

As for himself he has no earthly motion.
But thinks sighs, tears, vows, prayers, and sacrifices
As good as shows, masques, jousts, or tilt-devices.
Then sit thee down and say thy Nunc Dimittis

With De Prqfundis^ Credo ^ and TV Deum;
Chant Miserere^ for what now so fit is

As that or this, Paratum est cor Meum ?
O that thy saint would take in worth thy heart !
Thou canst not please her with a better part.
When others sing Venite Exultemus

Stand by and turn to Nolo Aemulari;
For Q^are fremuerunt use Oremus

Vivat EUza for an Ave Mary,
And teach those swains that live about thy cell
To sing Amen when thou dost pray so well."

ENGLAND'S HELICON, ETC. 177

Flattery of Elizabeth is not often, except in Shake-
speare, so pleasingly managed, and hardly ever so
temperate, as here ; we cannot say, as a rule, that the
courtier-poet is "happiest in fiction." Conceive that
" gracious creature," Sidney, descending to this in the
character of Therion, a forester, contending in song
with Espilus, a shepherd, for the May-Lady :

"Two thousand deer in wildest woods I have ;
Them can I take but you I cannot hold ;
He is not poor who can his freedom save
Bound but to you, no wealth but you I would,
But take this beast if beasts you fear to miss^
For of his beasts the greatest beast he is,
{Both kneeling to her Majesty^
Espilus —
Judge you, to whom all beauty's force is lent

Therion —
Judge you of Love to whom all love is bent."

This is not the Sidney whom we know; theAstrophel,
the vicissitudes of whose love for Stella we can study
anew in the pretty volume, so ably edited by Mr.
Pollard. This " In Memoriam " of unavailing love is
worthy of the man of high and chivalrous courage who
wrote the letter on the French match. In Sidney's
sonnets we trace the course of a passion whose only
rival, whilst hope remains, is thjs patriotic fire that
longs for active service in the field. The moral might
at times be Lovelace's :

" I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not Honour more."

Nowhere has the ennobling power of a manly and

N

178 ENGLAND'S HELICON, ETC.

worthy affection been better described than in his
words —

** If that be sinne which doth the manners frame,
Well staid with truth in word and faith of deed,
Readie of wit, and fearing nought but shame ;
If that be sinne which on fixt hearts doth breed
A loathing of all loose unchastitie.
Then love is sinne, and let me sinfiill be.''

And, when hope is gone, the struggle is never
Ignoble, never undignified; the higher influences pre-
vail, and a purer ideal at last succeeds — ^^Splendidis
longum vcUedico nugtSy* is the motto which closes the
record, when he takes farewell of earthly passion :

"... let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And think how evill becommeth him to slide.
Who seeketh heav'n, and comes of heavenly breath.
Then farewell, world ; thy uttermost I see :
Etemall Love, maintaine thy life in me.''

Sidney is the most dramatic of sonneteers. In this
capacity Shakespeare and he change places. Even
if we suppose, with Mr. Gerald Massey, that Shake-
speare only occasionally writes in his own person, he
uses his art to conceal his art, to mystify rather than
to embellish, and the result is an effect the reverse of
dramatic. But Sidney is constantly revealing to us
the life in which he moved, the entourage of that
secret passion which he bore about in the midst of
it. He wins the prize in the tourney, in the judg-
ment not only of his own countrymen, but of some

ENGLAND'S HELICON, ETC. I79

sent, as he says in a phrase which concentrates the
very spirit of chivalry, "from that sweet enemy France."
Those who are skilled in horsemanship attribute
his success to this ; the townsfolk praise his strength ;
jealous rivals assign all to luck; some say that his
prowess is hereditary both on the father's and the
mother's side ; Sidney hears it all ; he alone knows
the reason :

" Stella lookt on, and from her heavenly face

Sent forth the beames which made so faire my race.**

He describes a lover's impatience in words which,
with a very slight change of form, might easily pass as
an excerpt from some Shakespearean scene :

" Be your words made, good sir, of Indian ware
That you allow me them by so small a rate ?
Or do you cutted Spartanes imitate ?
Or do you meane my tender eares to spare.
That to my questions you so totall are ?
When I demand of Phcenix Stella's state,
You say, forsooth, you left her well of late :

God, thinke you that satisfies my care ?

1 would know whether she did sit or walkc ;

How cloth'd ; how waited on ; sighd she or smilde
Whereof, with whom, how often did she talke ;
With what pastime time's journey she beguilde ;
If her lips daignd to sweeten my pore name.
Say all : and all well sayd, still say the same." ^

Sometimes he moves as a knight of the rueful

* Cf. Rosalind, in "As You Like It," iii. 2, 231 sq, : "What
did he when thou sawest him ? What said he ? How looked h9t
Wherein went he f Did he ask for me?" etc, etc.

• .- *

i3o ENGLANiyS HF.T.TCON, ETC.

M«^ !*•(■ «.«

among the bright fistive gatiierings of
tiie Goort, axid is bdd to be proad and

RcLJiiie lue oft in dazfce abstzacted gmse

most alooe in greatest mmpanie."
He B teased about the cnrrent questions of the day:

* Ham UbKer fikes of that same golden bit
Wherewith nif fiuber ooce made it haUe tame ?
If in die Scotch court be no weltring yet?
These cpKstians busK wits to me do firame :
I, csmbced with good maneis^ answer do
Boc know not how : for still I tfainke of you."

He begs the pditidan who discourses to him —

** Of courtly tides,
Of canning fishers in most troaUed streames
Of strafing wayes^ when valiant erronr guides,"

to take his wisdom

''To them that do such entertainment need."

His heart, he says —

** ^<onfers with Stella's beames
And is even irkt that so sweet comedie
By such unsuted speech should hindred be."

We had much more to say, if space permitted. We
have taken only a partial survey of these treasures.
We have wandered among the wealth which Mr.
Bullen and Mr. Pollard have shown us once more, as
a visitor to some noble mansion, who prefers the
statuary to the Dresden china. Yet the shepherds and
shepherdesses of the Elizabethan era, though they do
plight their troth " before god Pan, and then to Church,"

ENGLAND'S HELICON, ETC. i8i

are not wholly an anachronism. The city has not yet
absorbed literature, its dust and dirt have not yet
choked up in Euterpe's flute all the stops which echo
the native sounds of the fields and woodlands. Many
a reveller at the Mermaid could have held discourse
with Perdita amid her flowers, and knew well, when
and where to find those * pretty daughters of the earth
and sun ' —

« The daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath ; pale primroses
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength ; bold oxlips and
The Crown Imperial."

We are still some distance from the days once so
bright and brilliant, but now like some " banquet-hall
deserted" where the candles are flickering in the
sockets, when dissolute beaux and frivolous women of
fashion monopolized the names of pastoral song.
Daphnis and Mopsus still carry with them the aroma
of the country, though sometimes, alas ! of the stable.
Nature, with her ever-fresh sources of inspiration, is
nearer to men here, even in their dreams of a life
wholly fanciful and unreal, than she condescends to
be to the brilliant epigrammatist of a later day, whose
Daphnis has gone to the town, whence no charms can
bring him back again, whose Chloe reads Rochester,
whose Phyllis has taken to paint and patches, and
whose Mopsus is a Mohawk.

N2

A CAMBRIDGE REMINISCENCE

THIS happened in Brown's rooms at Trinity in
1865. Dalston mentioned some lines in that
strange poem, Bailey's "Festus," where a certain
country is compared to

"A worm divided into parts
That sprouts forth heads and tails but grows no hearts.''

" Absurd ! " cried Brown, a * natural science " man,
and prosaic — " This is the vis formativa naturcB^ with
a vengeance."

" I don't care whether it's true or not," said the more
imaginative Dalston ; " I think the idea is suggestive."

" So suggestive," said Merton with a strange twinkle
in his eye, " that it is the merest commonplace among
the poets."

Dalston : " Indeed ? I thought I knew my poets
pretty well, but I don't remember meeting with it
elsewhere."

Merton : " I'll undertake to produce half-a-dozen
instances out of my own reading, by this time to-
morrow, if you'll come to my rooms then."

Merton was a strange creature ; very versatile and

A CAMBRIDGE REMINISCENCE 183

various ; no one knew the limits of his powers or
knowledge. He was a complete puzzle both to friends
and examiners. He was the counterpart of Robert
Browning's " Waring " in some respects, with a tinge
of Shakespeare's "Puck," which made him not less
mysterious, but perhaps more agreeable. He dis-
appeared at once when he took his degree, and
whether he became an Avatar in Vishnuland we have
never heard.

We went to his rooms according to appointment,
and he took down Milton at once from his shelves.
"Now," he said, "we'll begin with Milton, and the
fight in heaven with the rebel angels :

" Cloven in twain by the ArchangePs sword,
Each half became a fiend instinct with life
Malignant, such the vital energy
They hold in common with the worms of earth."

He rapidly shut the volume and replaced it " Ah !"
said Dalston, " that is Milton all over — * instinct with
life malignant,* though it is strange that I did not
remember it." But by this time Merton had opened
Wordsworth, and was reading from the " Wanderer "

" * See, sir,' he said,
And pointed to the ground beneath our feet,
* Yon cloven worm that, writhing now in pain,
(Unwished-for sight, yet fraught with meaning high)
Soon, touched by Nature's healing hand, shall live
Doubly henceforth, each half a separate whole
Rejoicing twofold in the tempered beam
Of this declining sun that, even now

i84 A CAMBRIDGE REMINISCENCE

Shining obliquely o'er the radiant earth,
(Radiant as with the fond departing smile,
Not all devoid of sadness of a friend
Who goes, nor till the morrow may return)
Seems but . . . etc' "

Wordsworth, The Wanderer,

" Well," he broke off, " I suppose you've had enough
of that ? "

" I should think so," said Brown.

" I confess," said Dalston, " that I have often skipped
in reading the * Excursion.* "

" Well, but you haven't skipped, I suppose, in read-
ing * In Memoriam,*" answered Merton, putting Words-
worth away and beginning to read :

" If knowledge be of things we see
Then thou and I may meet no more,
Since Nature from an endless store

Supplies each new deficiency :

" With complex form increasing still
And out of endless phases wrought.
She blindly works as one self-taught

Nor cares for unity of will :

*' But still to separate purpose turned

In divers fragments of the whole.

As myriad orbM atoms roll
Where once a mighty Planet burned :

*' In loftiest grade, in lowliest form.
She works like one who strives for gain,
Gleaning from ruin and from pain

In shattered globe, in severed worm.

A CAMBRIDGE REMINISCENCE 185

" Yet, turning from her soulless face,

I raise my eyes as one who hears

A voice of trust beyond the years,
Re-echoed from the vast of space."

We noticed that Dalston looked very puzzled and
uneasy during the reading of this passage, but Merton's
rapidity of action and recitation did not allow much
discussion, and he briskly took down a Byron and
began :

'* So he abandoned hope in earth or heaven.
And took the downward plunge, nor cursed his fate.
But with loud song and reckless laughter driven
He scoffed at bale or bliss, seeming elate
And fearless, while from every succour riven
Sheer to the depth he dropt, and Sin and Hate
Wove their dark meshes round him, yet his life
Failed not but fiercely waged redoubled strife —

• » » » •

Like the cleft worm that dies not : (asking pardon
And trusting I may make my meaning clear
By the suggestion) fetch one from your garden.
Though it may turn, divide it without fear.
And by the morrow's sun each half will be
As neat a worm as you would wish to see."

It was Sunday evening. The chapel bell was
already ringing and we should be getting on our sur-
plices in another minute.

" Now," says Merton, ' for Shakespeare, 'Comedy of
Errors * :

^^^ Dromio of Ephesus, Marry, sir ! he could make neither
head nor tail of my reasonings, being, in respect of this, less
wise than the worms that shall one day feed on him.' "

i86 A CAMBRIDGE REMINISCENCE

"One minute more," says Merton. **Dalston, I
know, reads Dante." Shakespeare went up, and down
came the Commedia.

Purgatorio :

^ Or di Lettor, s* io non fii in forse miso,
Questo udendo, ed il parlare oscuro,
£ siccom' al vermo ch' h per colpo diviso,
Io guardando pur all' alto muro,
D'un dubbio troncato due si fanno :
Ond' io, Maestro, il senso tuo m'^ duro.
Ed tgli 2L me. . . ."

In another moment we were scudding across the
great court like the flakes of cloud severed from the
main rack. "You couldn't find another anyhow,"
whispered Dalston to Merton as we went in.

" Wait till to-morrow," said he.

Dalston was going fishing the next day. On opening
the tin box where he had put his bait, he found it all
abstracted save one bisected worm.

In the lid of the box a paper, neatly inserted, con-
tained these words in Merton's writing :

" Puir worm thou'rt coupit clean i* twain,
An' ilka writhin' end seems fain
Wi' mony a warstle to complain.

My mair than brither,
A head ane end maun mak* again,

Atail thetither!"

Burns.

Moreover Merton, who had gone down that morn-
ing, left at the porter's lodge an envelope addressed to

A CAMBRIDGE REMINISCENCE 187

*

Dalston containing, to complete the series, the follow-
ing selection from Robert Browning :

•

" My friend, you trust too much. Listen to this :

That hand you vow has will and power to set

Starved Ugolino and his dying sons

In breezy banquet hall at royal feast,

The outstretched hand you think has strength to draw

Laocoon from the straining serpent-folds.

The hand, I say, you follow through the world

May startle you with sudden flick i' the face

(Blue bruise for blessing on your reverent brow),

Turn key again on Ugolino's boys

With their blind father in the hungry tower,

Enwreath that other group with added coils

Fresh sprouted from the lately-severed rings

Of growth persistent, — *tis the way o' the worm.

Grub in your garden, man. The fact will speak."

M. T.

CHISWICX PRESS :— CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

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